Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am moving towards the awesome side of the scale and I'm recognizing that for this particular
vlog, Growing your YouTube Channel to 100.000 Subscribers, I'm soon going to have come up
with a different name because we’re past the 100,000 subscribers.
Today, I've got some really interesting statistics and observations brought to you by the good
folks at Kissmetrics.
Well, it finally happened.
Last week I received notice in my Creator Studio that YouTube has invited me to get
my silver play button because I've hit 100,000 subscribers.
So I filled out the information and they are now in process of sending me a silver play
button.
Woohoo!
We made it.
I'm quite excited about that.
That’s going to be a little bit of awesomeness.
Now on the same day actually that I received that notification, I was browsing the inter-webs
and I found this post from the folks at Kissmetrics.
It’s co-authored I guess by our friends at Vidooly, which is a terrific analytics
company for YouTube management and it’s called 5 Noteworthy Ways to Increase Engagement
on YouTube.
And as I read through it, it brought so much into focus for me that I thought this is something
that I want to share with you.
I don’t want to just share it with you by sending you an email and let you know about
it.
Instead, I kind of want to walk you through some of the different things that they observe
in it.
There are some things that we can do a lot about and some things we can’t do very much
about at all.
But they have an interesting point, that the average attention span of a goldfish is 9
seconds and the average attention spans of humans as of now is about 8.25 seconds.
So I've already gotten way beyond your average attention span if you’re still with this
video but the bottom line is we’re falling behind goldfish as far as our ability to concentrate.
What this means is for you content creators, it puts that much more pressure and that much
more responsibility on us to create engaging content that retains viewers because that
is so important for success on YouTube.
Now the average watch time of video now online is 2.7 minutes so you can use that as a baseline
to work from.
Of course, a few videos are longer than 2.7 minutes but if you’ve got videos of any
length and you’re not retaining your videos for 2.7 minutes, you’re already falling
behind the curve and you know YouTube is going to charge us harshly for us and not look at
our video as being valuable.
So pay attention such close attention to what happens at the top end of your video, your
engaging opening, not having too long a graphic, making sure that you identify clearly what
the video is about to your audience and making it interesting.
All of those things come into play and come into focus when we look at this.
If you drop beneath that threshold, I think that you’ve got a lot of work to do.
Even those that are above that threshold constantly have to pay attention to increasing not just
the length of our engagement but our percentage of engagement in the video.
So a good point there.
I didn’t realize it was 2.7 minutes.
That’s a good thing to see.
Retention and watch time, the video lengths under a minute, 80% of people stay.
So if they know it’s short, they will stay.
60% retention is in the 2- to 3-minute video and 5- to 10-minutes videos have 50% retention.
So 50% of the viewers drop off halfway.
I have to tell you that’s my experience.
Most of my videos, as this one here will be, are over 5 minutes.
It’s usually around the 7 to 8-minute mark and typically speaking, I see in those videos
50% to the better ones maybe 60%.
If I'm over 60% I'm thrilled.
If I'm under 50% I'm quite concerned that I didn’t pack enough information into the
very beginning or maybe the topic isn’t as good.
But that’s again something that you have to basically do a lot of self-evaluation,
looking at your YouTube analytics to determine where you fall on that spectrum.
The longer the video drags on, as they say, the lower its retention.
However, the good news is that the average YouTube session has increased.
The average video watch time per day is 39 minutes.
So more people are watching YouTube more often and they are watching 39 minutes of video
every day online.
I don’t think that’s just YouTube video.
I think that’s online video but that’s a very compelling and encouraging statistic
for you and I who create online video.
People are coming to the online space in order to consume video.
We knew that intuitively but it’s good to see the statistics are continuing.
Where are they watching?
Well, it depends on what your market is but if you’re a millennial, if you’re delivering
your content to millennials, they’re really consuming a huge percentage of video on their
smartphones, which speaks to our formatting, length and all those other things.
Computers, tablets, a very low percentage.
But a lot of people are also engaging in video on the television, watching YouTube and other
online videos through their players like Apple TV and that sort of stuff which is pretty
darn interesting.
Of course, the whole growth of mobile is fascinating but here is the statistic that absolutely
blew me away.
I always thought vertical videos were evil, as they say right here.
But it turns out that they’re not.
Completed videos of vertical video ads are smartphone are 9 times higher than horizontal
ads, meaning that people when they’re holding their phones and consuming video, they’re
holding them this way, they’re holding them upright and if you want to create video that
you know a large percentage of people are watching on a smartphone—I can’t believe
I'm saying this—it’s worth considering vertical format.
I'm not going to do it but you can certainly consider it and it is definitely food for
thought.
This is the one statistic in this study that just absolutely blew me away – 9 times more
retention than horizontal video ads.
That is just amazing.
Peak hours are weekdays.
The time that people watch your video and consume it is important.
I guess it’s certainly more important I think to people who are playing on the Facebook
space as to when they post, when they’re going to be above the fold and when they’re
going to be promoted the most in the newsfeed.
Of course as Facebook changes their algorithms, that’s an increasing challenge and a moving
target so that statistic doesn’t mean as much to me.
But here, this is where the rubber meets the road for you and me, for YouTube content creators.
Why do people watch videos on YouTube specifically?
Inspiration and entertainment 53%, learning, knowing instructions and deciding what to
buy is the preponderance of video that people are using, which as far as I'm concerned is
becoming the nature of YouTube video.
When we consider the difference between YouTube and all of the other video forms online, the
one difference that YouTube has is intent.
When people come to watch a video on YouTube, it’s their intention to consume that video.
It’s not an accidental view like they happened to just scroll by and it caught their attention.
No.
They’ve come, they’ve searched, they’ve looked and they want to consume the content.
This is a tremendous opportunity and this is why, despite all these doom and gloom people
saying that Facebook video is going to be dominating YouTube video in a period of time,
it might be true but right now Facebook video is accidental video.
It just scrolls through and you happen to see something interesting.
YouTube video is intentional.
The value of an intentional communication is light years ahead of the value of an accidental
communication.
Accidental will slowly build your brand, will slowly build your community and create opportunity.
Intentional has the opportunity to create success right now.
People watch your video to learn from you.
When you do a call to action in that video, the chances of them engaging to the next level
with you are in order of magnitude greater than in the accidental side.
So this to me is the most compelling statistic of all.
Then they get in to talking about video and email, which I'm not going to waste time on
today because I want to keep this video reasonably short.
But it’s certainly food for thought for the future.
So today, I'm going to put a link to this blog in our blog and in the description below
because I think you’re going to want to read through it and certainly send some props
to the folks at Vidooly and Kissmetrics and thank them for it because it is a great piece
of background information for us YouTube content creators.
That’s all the time that I have for today.
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We appreciate that very much.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!