Why Audience Retention matters LESS than you think
I tested how much YouTube audience retention and Click Through Rate matter. The results are contradicting everything you know about YouTube.
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⏰ TABLE OF CONTENTS ⏰
• 0:00 Explaining the test
• 0:50 Audience retention numbers
• 2:01 Click through rate & engagement
• 2:34 This will drive you crazy
• 2:58 What is happening?
🔴 ** OUTLINE ** 🔴
You probably won't believe me when I say that Audience Retention, click through rate and a bunch of other metrics don’t matter that much for views.
I uploaded the same video twice to 2 different channels:
1) my main channel with 130 videos
2) a new channel with 5 videos
VIEWS:
500 views on my current channel (uploaded 5 days ago),
550 on the new channel (uploaded 2 days ago).
So in less days, it has more views.
AVD
How much Average View Duration or audience retention to blame for this
3:12min for 500 views
1:54min for 550 views
(the video is 5:46 min long)
That is a really big difference.
So, the video with less watch time is promoted more.
When I look at one of the videos that blew up on my new channel, and compare that with the same video on my main channel, it shows a similar pattern.
But on the other video the blew up, not, so it is not a given that worse watch time will always get you more promotion.
So am I saying that Average View Duration doesn’t matter?
No, you still need make sure that your audience retention is good because a bad audience retention is 100% a deranking factor I can say from experience.
Think about it, if YouTube has to decide whether to promote video A or B when everything else is the same, one keeps the audience watching longer, AVD will be the deciding factor.
But Watch time doesn't matter nearly as much as viewers clicking on thumbnails, surely Click Through Rate will corroborate that, right?
CTR:
Now Let’s take a look at Click Through Rate
On my main channel 7.4% with less views
On my new channel 5.2% with more views
So, the video with a lower CTR is promoted more, but more viewers clicked on the video with the lower click through rate
So the metric that shows us how many people clicked shows a lower number while the actual amount of c licks are higher.
And look at the amount of comments, almost twice as much on the video with less views.
When you try to explain your video’s promotion based on metrics like impressions, engagement, click through rate or audience retention, you will drive yourself bat shit crazy, because there seems to be no rhime or reason, there is so much going on behind the scenes that we as creators have no insights in.
And it is all compared to what our competition does, of which we don’t know their metrics.
WHY
Why is are videos on the newer channel promoted more when audience retention, CTR and the rest don’t matter that much.
I think it’s the difference in audience.
With my main channel I’ve probably pigeonholed myself with 130 videos into an audience that likes nerdying with numbers, because that’s what I like to do.
Proving that keyword tools don’t work, ctr is a lie, and this video is not exception.
But the subsection of youtube creators that likes that sort of stuff is really small, so low views, but the algorithm keeps pushing these videos to a really small audience.
The topics of the videos that blew up were pretty broad for YouTube creators, and therefore had a larger audience.
The algorithm thus had an easier time to find the right audience for that channel, and because it already found the right audience for 2 out of 5 videos, it knows better who to suggest the new video to.
As a new channel the algorithm is pretty unbiased when it comes to audience, it has no clue yet who the audience is on a new channel and starts suggesting it to more random people.
That can go well or wrong, that is what I call the luck factor.
🔎 HASHTAGS
#youtubeaudienceretention