If you’re one of those YouTube celebrities, you must know how difficult it is to rely on a faceless, unknown YouTube algorithm. The success and failure of your content completely depend on the workings of the distribution mechanism. Whether it’s a reality show or drama series, you need to know how to promote it, where to put the ad breaks, which channel you’re going to show it, and so on. But, how do you know how the YouTube algorithm works? Thanks to Jeremy Rosen and Matt Gielen who found out about the YouTube algorithms after six months of study on YouTube channels at Frederator.
Watch Time:
If you want the YouTube algorithm to care about your channel, you must clock some solid watch time. Well, it definitely doesn’t mean minutes watched, so don’t get confused with it. Basically, “Watch Time” is a combo of six factors: Views, View Duration, Session Starts, Upload Frequency, Session Duration, and Session Ends.
High View Velocity is a Must:
The velocity relates to how much faster your content picks up views within the first few hours or just a day after an upload. The algorithm will promote the high-velocity video faster since the high velocity means high potential for growth. The researchers “found with a near 92% accuracy we could predict whether a video would perform well for us based on its View Velocity. Essentially, there was a direct correlation between the percentage of subscribers who viewed in the first 72 hours and a video’s life to date viewership.”
Poor View Velocity Affects Future Uploads:
Your past performance can affect your future, also true for YouTube videos. If there’s a video which has got fewer than 5% of subscribers, YouTube algorithm will push your future videos to a small number of your subscribers.
View Duration:
It means how much time a viewer spends watching an individual video. This metric contains a lot of weight and from the research data; they suggest an obvious tipping point. “On Channel Frederator this year, videos with an average View Duration of over eight minutes brought in an average of over 350% more views in the first 30 days than those under five minutes.”
Longer Videos Enhance Viewership Performance:
With some anecdotal evidence, the researchers recommend that just by making your videos longer can improve your viewership performance. They try by uploading three to four videos per week of varying length (3 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes and 70 minutes), from which they noticed 70 minutes length video got more viewership in the first two days than the other videos.
YouTube Doesn’t Promote Videos, But Channels:
If you think YouTube only promotes your videos, you are wrong. Its goal is to build your channels’ audience. The algorithm is designed in a way that it only promotes your channels using the video. Using a combination of video specific data and channel aggregate data the algorithm decides which video to promote.
The researchers found that the YouTube algorithm is designed in a way that it will promote the channel with videos that get and keep a large portion of their niche audience watching. So, if you want to be successful on YouTube, you’re suggested to focus on one very specific niche interest and make videos with 10 minutes or longer duration on that particular topic.
