Audience retention is how much of a video that people watch before getting bored.
Very few people watch 100%.
I studied a lot of channels in my previous video, but giving a channel an average rating
is like trying to describe a movie in one word.
Let's look at my two main channels in depth.
With 2kliksphilip, longer videos tend to have a lower % being watched and vice versa.
The exception to this is How Will He Die, which manages both a short time AND percentage
being watched.
But the average for this BORING series is still 54%, which is actually the same as the
average for all of the videos on my channel.
If my least interesting series is still performing averagely, what's dragging down the average
audience retention?
The answer: my most successful series, Going Low in CSGO.
It's the most subscribed-to, most watched and highest budget video series that I make,
and yet the latest series averages out at below 50% audience retention, simply because
the videos are long at almost 10 minutes each.
In conclusion, extremely short and long videos will have great values for one of the two
audience retention figures, but the other will suffer as a result.
Videos of middling length will have a compromise of both.
With 3kliksphilip, the main series all have above-average viewing ratings for both audience
retention values.
To work out what's pushing down the average we have to look elsewhere, at the individual
videos.
This is where THIS screen comes in handy and the top 2 videos show it beautifully, especially
since they're one-off videos.
One has a large % being watched but a short length and the other has a long length and
tiny % being watched.
From this, I can see that if I wanted to improve my audience retention figures, I should probably
stick to the same series and types of videos rather than making these one-off specials
that tend to either be very long, or very short.
Bear in mind that the average retention is only in the last 28 days.
I took a look at mine monthly and it looks like THIS!
Evidently there's a lot of variation as time goes on, depending on the type and number
of videos that I'm releasing.
Good news is that it's a lot better than it was a year ago, bad news is that both channels
have dropped off in the last few months.
WHY?
Let's pick some interesting points and work out what happened.
The simplest thing would be to check which videos were released on days when the retention
changed a lot.
The problem is that some videos become popular AFTER being released, so instead I'll study
the number of views per day.
Might as well start with this channel.
Ignore the bit at the beginning, that's a horrible, horrible glitch.
This first spike coincides with the first day of my 'How To Finish Projects' video which
managed 42% of that day's views.
Despite very positive figures, it only changed one day before returning to pretty much normal.
This downwards spike was likely caused by my Arma 3 interactive map project where I
uploaded about 100 videos showing the massive island from a number of locations.
It wasn't very well received and didn't exactly do my audience retention any favours.
This graph only shows the viewing length and not the % of the entire thing so bigger isn't
always better.
For example, this spike was caused by me releasing a 20-minute long Splinter Cell Blacklist video.
People watched it for over 6 minutes but the percentage was just 25%.
Another example of an extreme video performing well in one way but not in another.
It's all well and good picking out individual days, but what I really want to know are the
long-term changes.
How about this upwards trend here?
The first day of it coincided with the release of my '10 reasons why CSGO is better than
its rivals' video, one that has gained 350,000 views since its release- making it my second
most popular video released since 2011.
Its consistently high viewing figures, together with high audience retention values, explain
why it has helped with the lasting jump in this graph.
But that's my second most viewed video.
You'd think that my most popular one, 'Quest for Karambit', would make even more of an
impact!
Guess when that was released.
It was here.
Why doesn't anything change?
It's because the average time it's watched for is 2 minutes 40 seconds, which happens
to be exactly what the average for my channel was BEFORE it was released.
It wouldn't have fluctuated up or down even if this video was watched a billion times!
The only difference it might make should it get enough views is that the fluctuation after
its release would be less.
Imagine if 99% of views on my channel were of a video where people watched for 2 minutes
40 seconds- it wouldn't jump up and down as much.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that random fluctuations are a GOOD thing.
It means that there's a huge variety of videos influencing it and that you're not just relying
on a couple of cash-cow videos to drive your channel.
The Willy Bum Bum channel probably has a VERY consistent average retention since it's all
coming from the same video.
But that, of course, depends on whether a video gets the same audience retention value
on the day of release as it does a year later.
I quickly checked with Quest for Karambit and it does appear to go down with age- probably
because people only go back to it to look at specific parts or because imitating videos
come out and reduce the appeal of watching the original all the way through!
And just to satisfy your curiosity, this large dip on 2kliksphilip was caused by a short
but very popular video called 'Where was I supposed to shoot' and the peak at the end
of December was from my new Going Low in CSGO video.
Despite an average view duration on that day of 4:49, the average % was still 58%.
The video itself was higher than that but was weighed down by everything else on my
channel.
And let's end with the audience retention of my previous audience retention video.
Conclusion?
Eerily similar to the average for my channel as a whole.
Note that there's no tail at the end.
People tend to click off the moment they sense a video's about to end so I deliberately CUT
IT OFF early!
And this is where things get interesting.
Because this video has now ended.
I'm hoping for a proper tail to this one.
You have to decide whether you want to defy the tail by watching to the bitter end, or
if you want to get on and watch that interesting related video that has boobs for a thumbnail.
I'll let you decide.
Or you could replay these last 10 seconds several times and RUIN EVERYTHING!
You monster.