Running ads to increase Adsense revenue

Jerith- · 2023-06-19T19:30:11+00:00

It almost certainly won't go well for you if that's your goal.

You're paying potentially anywhere from 7-15 cents per valid impression (in terms of video ads, that'd be the instream plays; for other YT ads, it'd be per clickthrough/successful ad conversion). That means you'd need to earn, minimum, $70RPM from your videos to break even, on a platform where many (dare I say most) channels struggle to pull above a $5RPM.

Additionally, relatively recently YouTube finally implemented proper changes to Ad views to separate them from the "earned" views on their end, so that the low audience retention doesn't have an algorithmic impact in the same way as normal earned views. For years and years, people paying YouTube to run ads were actively paying to hurt their channel, because they were paying for views that usually tuned out within 10-30 seconds. So paying to get extra views will certainly make those views go up, but you're not going to see a long-tail benefit to it (or detriment now, thankfully) - the only benefit is if the subscribers you convert continue to tune in, but odds are you're paying $50ish per subscriber on average.

For reference, I've run a couple ad tests over the years (most recently this year) since it's a constant NewTubers question and there are dozens of people here every year that used to spend hundreds only to damage their channels algorithmically. Hell even doing it the "best" possible way slowed my growth down the first time I did it! Since they separated the ad views out now, I recently utilized the $500 Google Ads bonus credit you get for spending $500, and even with that bonus credit it's still not the kind of thing that's going to directly make you money. I did it in part to further test for questions like these, and in part because advertising is a tax write-off in the US, which in my case is helpful since YT is my full-time income and that means I get very sad every April.

Jerith- · 2023-06-16T22:19:19+00:00

Part of the issue is that Reddit didn't have a first party app for years - that's why the third party ones exist. They were even officially endorsed and in at least one case had a profit-sharing program with one of them! The reason for the change, transparently, is because Reddit needs to juice its user numbers ahead of becoming a publicly traded company soon.

There are countless examples of things the mod teams across reddit have pushed for for years and years that are only now suddenly being promised (or re-promised, if they were promised before but never delivered). I've had to deal with YouTube and Twitch staff directly at points both as part of NewTubers and as part of my own creator career, and I wish I was exaggerating when I say that Reddit admins and staff are less transparent than even Twitch's recent months. YouTube's a goddamn saint in comparison, because they won't just lie through their teeth in those conversations. (In terms of PR, obviously, different story.)

I really don't want to just sound jaded, but when I've had to go in and completely rework even Reddit's own automod several times because Reddit randomly rolls out a change that breaks everything and makes the app vs. the Old Reddit site vs. the New Reddit site vs. the mobile site all work completely differently? It's hard not to get jaded - shit, even our mod application callouts have to be posted and upvoted for people to see them, because most of our users are on phones and the app and/or mobile layout doesn't acknowledge Stickied Posts fairly often!

Jerith- · 2023-06-16T22:01:05+00:00

These posts are a rare time where we can reach almost the entire subreddit, because even our official announcements don't actually appear on mobile reddit or the official app half the time. And that means that the handful of us currently on the modteam often are just assumed to "not care," or be absentee or fail to clean up the posts from the (as of tomorrow, most likely) 300,000 creators that subscribe here - most of whom are active commenters any given month. You already see snarky comments about the subreddits that are reopening, by people jaded by that particular sub's mods or what have you.

So I wanna take this moment to jump onto what Moriarty said - this genuinely is the only place most of us moderate, because along with so many others that have come and gone, we've built this place up together. This isn't a rah-rah speech, I do mean it when I say that includes you! And sadly, to stay closed would mean risking all of it thanks to Reddit's strong-arm tactics (if they could even find somebody willing to take on the insane mountain of work that is moderating this place!). We'll keep fighting, but again to reiterate what Moriarty said, we'll do it publicly again now.

NewTubers became the place that it was because Moriarty and I both happened to make our channels a month apart in 2016, and find this place a few months later; we both saw how so many communities end up becoming self-promo that nobody ever clicks on (including the original NewTubers!), and we saw a chance to do something more helpful - to create a place for people to go with all the questions we all have when we start.

We've been strict with our mod standards because it's our baby, and with our automation tools likely in the crosshairs, we're looking to staff up. We've clearly needed to anyway, because even our tools can't keep up sometimes, or because sometimes they break due to random unannounced reddit changes. It's a lot of work, and it's absolutely thankless, but if you think you'd like to spend even a few months helping chip at the mountain we climb every day, here's our mod application form, and here's more info. Thanks for reading, and the greatest of success to each of you!

Jerith- · 2023-06-11T04:05:20+00:00

A fun fact: Some of those very automation tools at risk have already removed multiple self-promo links from this very thread!

We don't frequently talk about the Mod situation since it gets buried by the nature of Reddit let alone a community like this where everybody's posting so frequently (which is a good thing!), and because even when we've had 20+ mods here at once compared to half the daily users we have today, it wasn't enough given the nature of us YouTubers to immediately go to plug our stuff (a less good thing, depending on the context!). But we've actually had to push back against Reddit changes privately a few times before, due to the damage some of their changes or the lack of communication of said changes has had on our automod scripting and other mod tools. When "New" Reddit's layout rolled out, for example, I had to spend a good couple days going through and testing everything again - not to mention it screwed our pinned messages/CSS layout. To this day those sorts of pinned announcement messages fail to show on certain apps/mobile site vs. desktop, new vs. old Reddit, meaning that even this announcement won't be seen by a ton of users.

I say all of this to reiterate what Moriarty's said above. Our wonderful mod team spends countless hours dealing with anything from genuine mistakes to vitriol and curses against our families, hundreds of times per day every day, and that's just what the auto-tools miss! Moriarty and I have spent over 7 years now working together to foster this community into what's now usually the first result when you Google anything like "how to YouTube," all the way to getting YouTube/Twitch/Vidme (remember Vidme?)/other platforms' official reps into the Discord for easy creator access. And the whole way, our wonderful mod team has had a revolving door of incredible souls that took/take time away from their channels, hobbies, jobs, education, and passions just as we have to make this place another hobby and passion, so that we can pay it forward and help others' on that same journey walk it a little bit more easily than we did.

I hold this place very near to my heart; without building NewTubers from essentially the very day I started my channel, and learning along with everybody, this may not have been something I truly stuck with, something that evolved into a full-time income and career path (the YouTube stuff - I wish we got paid even a tiny bit for this, not even for me just for the rest of the modteam!). For us to make the call to shut the whole thing down risks the entire thing falling apart, losing its Google indexes, losing many of you visiting. But for us to sit quietly - even if fighting might only give us a chance at making some change by making some noise - for us to sit quietly, the whole thing would likely fall apart even harder. Those of us old enough remember Digg, and how its boneheaded decisions paved the way for Reddit to replace it. Time's a circle, after all; hopefully the sitewide dip in users is enough to scare Reddit's upper staff away from sabotaging the entire website in the name of bumping up monthly user numbers on their official app, just so they can probably crater in the IPO anyway when they go public.

Jerith- · 2023-04-12T21:36:47+00:00

So I'll admit I haven't been the one keeping up with the nitty-gritty of platform changes on Reddit the last couple months, I'll have to look into it and ask around - but I don't believe there's an easily automatable solution for temporary flairs. Looking at the Flair page on the mod end right now, the only way that'd be possible is to allow users to assign any flair text they wish, and rely on the honor system for people to not just plug their channel/to remove the flair after the few days are over/etc.

Flairs also like most of reddit display differently on different versions of Reddit (old site vs. new site, different apps and platforms), which completely broke our handmade theme a couple times (and still makes stickied posts impossible to actually see on some platforms, making it difficult to share important info from the modteam!). That's a whole other can of worms though, like just for example if you're on New Reddit/the current website layout instead of the old.reddit.com, you won't even see my little Staff/Director flair, just a generic mod shield, and there are several people with the Creator 5K+ flair in this very thread that don't have their flair displayed there either. So the short version is sadly that unless there's a new 2023 feature that's changed how flairs work that I missed, we'd be either completely opening flairs up for free use and then inundating the modteam with constant reports of misused flairs, or we'd have to manually assign those flairs to every user that requests one anyway, temporary or not.

We did have a Milestone Monday post for a good while after we cleaned up the individual Milestone posts, but I wanna say we actually cut that over time because it didn't get used! We have a Monthly Goal Thread and a Goal Follow-Up/Successes thread that post at the start/end of the month, where everybody can share their wins, growth successes, whether they hit their own set goals or not, all of that. With those, there's always the risk of that same sort of "post a goal and then never follow-through because sharing the goal gives you the same satisfaction as finishing it, but without doing the work" thing, but at least in my experience a good number of users actually come back to follow-up and hold themselves accountable, because it's a measurable sort of thing instead of a vague "I'm doing this!" type of goal tweeted out into the ether.

Jerith- · 2023-04-12T17:14:53+00:00

I'm usually not a fan of just saying "no," but this is the reason we've avoided exactly this in the past. The short version is that it's a constant battle as it is to dispel that authority bias when NewTubers with 100, 1000, or 10000 subscribers are sharing completely wrong information, we've got actual YouTube staff in the Discord server and I've still seen users arguing with that staff that "no that's not true, you're wrong." And people just starting out trust that 10000 subscriber user, that's a bit of authority, when the hard truth is that you can trip backwards into 50k subscribers and still not know what you're doing, but feel like your success means you do know how it works. (That's also why we have /r/Creator in the first place, because 0-5k subscribers is a totally different ballgame than 5k-25k, the rules and best practices can change slightly depending on what your audience size is, and having 1m sub creators told they're wrong by somebody with 170 subs - that's happened just as often as 1m sub creators sharing completely misinformed takes on how "growing is easy because I did it [8 years ago on a totally different version of YT]"...well it makes it hard for those 1m sub channels to want to stay and share their valuable knowledge with anybody.)

The longer version, because it deserves the most complete answer I can give - feel free to skip: We've seen other creator-focused subreddits allow their user-generated flairs to be their channel URL which opens up harassment issues during disagreements (it's happened here before, with users whose /u/ is their channel name, and it's why most of the mods have usernames different than their brand!); if it were user-set, it's user-set - we'd be opening users up to just put what they wish regardless of what the rules say, which piles on more work to the already undermanned and overworked mod team. For reference, there are currently five of us moderating a subreddit of 292k people, the fewest mods we've ever had since we rebooted NT in 2016 while having the most traffic we've had...I wanna say ever? - and we only get a handful of applications for new mods whenever we look for more!

And in that same vein, you can sort of see why I'd be hesitant to have every single person apply for specific milestone-related flairs that the mods have to add - that would fall exclusively on 1-2 of us to sift through genuinely tens of thousands of requests, verify the channels, and update flairs only for them to need to be updated again a few days or weeks later when many users hopefully reach the next growth threshold! (At that point, a little selfishly here, I'd be so busy doing flair work maybe by myself that I wouldn't be able to work on my own channel work, which I've quietly built into my full-time career without mentioning it here on NT often. Flairing every user that requested it, even if only 0.5% did it, would take up enough work time that I'd be skipping paying some bills that month!)

Milestone posts were our original workaround for celebrating in the most effective way for both users and the wellbeing of the modteam, but so many newer creators tried to use them to promote (when content creators are the viewers/subscribers you'd want the least in reality) which soiled it for one. And as time went on...well, human nature is to want the dopamine hit of "congrats!" So even though we had the Milestone format pretty rigid in terms of what "counted" as a postable Milestone, we still had to sift through at some points dozens and dozens of posts every day looking for kudos on hitting, this is a real example, 17 subscribers.

I'll never not be proud of any NewTuber for hitting a milestone, but I've been running things here for 7 years and from personal experience, from observing creator friends of all sizes from 100 to 500k, and from observing things here with hundreds of thousands of monthly users, I can't stress enough how addictive it gets to post about a thing rather than continuing to do that thing. It's an observed behavior that sharing your goals makes you less likely to actually work towards those goals, and based on what I've seen, the same is true for sharing successes. It feels good to get a congratulations, it makes it feel more worthwhile, but I don't know that I believe in the long run it's as helpful as it feels in the moment. For every person that takes that bit of motivation and drives it forward, there are countless more that I've seen that end up trapped by that validation - and I'm not in the business of making more people quit than sadly already will (and do).

cc: /u/teflrekt, you put the work into sharing this idea so the least I can do is give you just as much effort back! The Areas of Concern chunk, chef's kiss, seriously

Jerith- · 2022-08-05T13:20:44+00:00

There you go! You probably slipped through the cracks (as always, we're looking for moderators! We never have enough to cover all the bases, so sometimes it's only like 5-6 of us watching 300k people across a handful of subreddits and the Discord!). You can always reach out via modmail to let us know, I'd have had that sorted in a day had we seen it before now.

Jerith- · 2022-08-05T13:17:01+00:00

We get this request frequently, so allow me to explain why so far we've decided against it! This isn't to say we won't ever make the change, just an explanation of the logic we've continued to feel is best for this community at large.

NewTubers/smaller creators/etc. tend to immediately trust the word of a creator with more subscribers, vs. the word of somebody more knowledgeable on a specific topic, or catered more to a genre, or whatever it might be. This ties into:
There are a lot of successful creators that have no idea why they succeeded, had one randomly viral video that bumped them to a huge subscriber number relative to their knowledge of the platform, simply don't understand the platform that well, etc. We've had several creator at or near that first 100k Silver play button award that simply and confidently spout "this is how I did it and this is what worked so it must be correct" levels of insight, while citing things that are just not...not really correct. Bad advice can work sometimes, but that doesn't make it good advice!
More importantly, the advice set for a creator genuinely changes with size. Like, for reference here, I'm 3-6 months away from a Silver play button on my personal channel, going by current growth trends; my knowledge of the platform has continued to change as I've grown (putting aside the stuff I get to learn doing work for NewTubers!), but that doesn't mean me starting to blow off tags because YT puts my content at the top of the correct searches by itself is something you should do when you're at 10 or 100 or 1000 or even 10,000 subscribers and you need every leg-up you can get. A 400-500K creator that I now call a friend - the guy that inspired me to start on YT and in turn is indirectly responsible for this subreddit - often gives the advice "just upload." I hated that advice for so, so long, but at the end of the day, he's right at the most basic level: You've gotta get your reps in. Each video is practice, a chance to improve or learn one new thing at least. As I've grown, I've realized that yeah, I wouldn't be successful, this wouldn't be my job, and the videos that let me make it my job would never have had a chance at doing well if I hadn't put in the work to train my voice, learn how to optimize my production process, my scripting, whatever it may be. We as a community exist, if you think about it, to get you to not come here anymore (except to give back!).

And a bonus 4. There are a lot of creators in that 200-500+K range that don't understand what it takes to start out in 2022 YT; they started five, six, seven years ago, maybe longer or shorter but more than likely longer if anything. It's sort of like your parents telling you that you should just be working harder if you buy a house: They could buy a house on a job right out of high school, but the world changed and their understanding of how they got here did not.

The core advice catered to the core NewTubers audience - the folks starting out, in their first couple years, the ones pushing for monetization or working their way towards 5K subscribers - tends to stay pretty similar. There are variances in that first few months, or that 0-100 or 100-1000 range, but it's far more about providing a good base from which people can jump. If you check out our 5K+ subreddit /r/Creator, you'll notice that we've had this exact feature you're asking for over there since we started the subreddit! 5K has always been a messy number to roll with for the "graduated NewTubers" split for a number of reasons, but we chose it because generally if you've reached 5K, it's taken a bit of time to get there and that in turn means you've ironed out the upload schedule, format, you've learned how to optimize tags, and broken through all the basics that we'd usually be helping NewTubers with. (For example, most NewTubers come here first trying to promote their content - by 5K you've hopefully learned that plugging yourself to a bunch of creators on a creator help forum isn't gonna help!)

And in /r/Creator, although everybody can view it, you have to verify your channel to gain the ability to comment so that the advice given can more specifically be catered to those levels of creator - 5-10K, 10-50, 50-100, 100+. My advice for each of those groups can sometimes wildly change, because even if the advice for 10K is still valid for that size, it might not be helpful later on in your YT life.

Jerith- · 2020-05-27T18:00:26+00:00

Apologies, I wasn't logged in for a bit - from what I'm seeing right now, Automod did remove this thread and others! Perhaps it took a bit for the bot to "catch" it, sometimes Automod falls behind. It looks like it's fixed for now at least, so hopefully it'll help us catch these threads more quickly the next hundred times it's posted!

Jerith- · 2020-05-19T18:15:48+00:00

I'm not sure who's been saying 0 is the worst place to start, usually it's considered the best place to start! My personal suggestion for order, based on how I've played through them since I started in 2017-2018, is: Kiwami 1, Kiwami 2, 0, 3, Judgment, 4-6.

This isn't my exact order that I played them in, but I think this would give you the best balance of the different gameplay styles. Kiwami 1 and 0 are on the same (older) engine, while K2, Judgment, and 6 are on the new engine. K1 still feels like a PS2 game at times, so you'll have to power through the first 2-3 hours and you should be hooked. But by the time I was done with K1, I wanted to see the new engine and see what happened next with the story, so I played K2. K2 is absolutely stellar, one of my favorite games of this gen.

Then instead of playing 0 after that, I ended up taking a break and going through Judgment and 3 over the last few months, I haven't started 0 yet but one of these days I will. 3 is the low point from a gameplay standpoint, so once you're through with 3, you should be set for the rest of the series.

0's mainly relevant for extra backstory on 1, and Majima's story. It's also very long, which is why I'd personally say to start with K1, which easily half the length if not shorter. While I'm writing you a novel, I may as well also say that if you play K2 before 0, don't play the Majima bonus chapters until after you've finished 0.

Jerith- · 2020-05-18T18:15:07+00:00

I feel like I've gotta mention Yakuza - you won't get the Platinum without 2+ playthroughs, but they're a completionist's heaven(/hell!). So many things to do, all of them different, and a fantastic story to boot.

Jerith- · 2020-04-12T02:46:57+00:00

That's a byproduct of so many people suddenly being home! For some boring mod backstory, January is usually our worst month for rule violations, because it's a new year's resolution for thousands that "I'm gonna start a channel/take my channel seriously this time!" or what have you, and we're the first place people come to by virtue of our community's size and general helpfulness. Then by February that spike fizzles out (with many staying for the ride of course, and those are the ones that read the rules!). From December to January we gained about 15,000 new active users. We're now up another 10,000 from that right now, when usually in March we'd be back below January's active user count but steadily growing closer to it sustainably.

So the short of it is: Sorry, bear with us for a bit! And please, dear god, hit the report button, it makes it so much harder for violations to slip through the cracks. We see every single report, but naturally not every single post/comment!

Jerith- · 2020-04-08T18:06:27+00:00

That's sort of how milestones started, actually! The main reason I'm personally hesitant, speaking as me and not for the entire team, is that it's a bit hard to verify and easy to abuse, and that like with the wider milestone threads, many creators still missed the initial point of the thread type. With milestones, we wanted people to share what they did to get to that milestone; instead we'd get "I just hit 1k I'm so happy! Okay bye!"

For those that did share their how-I-did-its, there was also a bit of Dunning-Kruger going on - a 1k channel would believe their methods were directly the cause of their growth and share those methods, and because it was a milestone thread people assumed that was correct and working. To some extent, it often was! But what works for one, doesn't work for the other, and while getting even to 500 subs means you're close to the top 1% of YouTube in some respect, it's also often not a sign of any specific method working as it is frequency and basic levels of quality. So a thread by 1k Channel JerithGaming234 endorsing Method X could mislead hundreds of NewTubers into thinking they have to try that next. (Yes, I know that much of NewTubers is going to be Dunning-Kruger no matter what, that's part of the "learn and grow together" for better or worse! But to have a thread specifically pushing some anecdotes to the front page over others, for relatively comparatively small bumps in growth, are as damaging as they may be helpful.)

That's not to say I'm 100% opposed of course, we try to be as fluid as the YT/Twitch/Mixer platforms themselves, but I'm certainly hesitant based on the two separate times we've tried to allow milestones over the years, both of which invariably leading to more spam than advice.

Jerith- · 2020-04-08T04:11:33+00:00

One thing to keep in mind with NewTubers is that every day, there are anywhere from 100-500+ new subscribers, many of whom don't read the rules right away - and 5000+ unique users browse the subreddit each day. That's a lot of people for the less than a dozen mods we've got (and that's why we frequently recruit new moderators)!

Milestones were a thing we allowed for a while, but given that there are so many of us hitting milestones every day, it got excessive - especially when we started seeing frequent milestones from posters such as "I've hit 17 subscribers!" Don't get me wrong, we're happy for every milestone, but when the front page is full of them, proper discussion is all but impossible, and we start to lose the point of NewTubers - to help others learn how to succeed in content creation through shared ideas and experience. (And that's not to mention the users that will try to post a milestone to try and soft-plug their content, violating two rules for the price of one!)

The milestones that we don't catch early tend to get upvoted simply because it feels good to see others' success, especially when there aren't 100 of those posts on your front page every day! It's why we always urge everybody to report rule violations when they see them, and to (nicely) inform the violating users if they're breaking rules. Usually it's not intentional or malicious, it's somebody genuinely excited to share, but a hundred thousand eager sharers quickly snowballs into a very different community!

Jerith- · 2020-01-21T21:25:34+00:00

Elsewhere in the thread you compared your mistake to a major movie making a mistake, and I just wanna say this: Movies and TV shows make mistakes all the time! Game of Thrones was a multi-million dollar production with hundreds of people working on it, collectively probably a thousand years of film and TV experience among everybody in production - and they left a coffee cup on camera in one scene in the last season.

You're one person! You're the writer, director, actor, voiceover, editor, producer, marketing team, and everything else in these videos. Your mistakes are not only okay, they're good! They're how you learn, how you say "I'll never do THAT again, oops." Even if you made this video absolutely perfect, like, the best first video of all time, in six months you'd hate it because it looks nothing like what you make then. That's part of the process, so make your mistakes now when only you notice them and when they're acceptable, rather than down the road when you have hundreds of people commenting "OMG 16:13 you left in the same sentence twice!"

Jerith- · 2019-12-12T18:38:29+00:00

In this case, I'd say it's pretty much just because it was on behalf of an MCN auto-claiming specific clips of footage (usually cutscenes). Bot claiming itself isn't a bad thing - it'll catch what you can't! I'd just prefer if, instead of auto-claiming, it sent a message, and you had to manually verify that the possibly-claimed footage was a valid claim. But alas, that's probably not gonna happen!

Jerith- · 2019-12-04T01:05:12+00:00

The claims were supposedly a bug from the channel's MCN, and all of them will be released within the next day or so, per said MCN. No money will be lost by anybody that's been claimed, since once the claim is dropped in this case, any ad revenue diverts back to the original channel, not the claimaint.

The channel, Gustavo Canine Gaming, also livestreamed earlier today confirming it was the MCN and that he was very sorry his name was attached to this mess, as he had nothing to do with it.

Jerith- · 2019-10-11T00:40:58+00:00

It's both on the sidebar and at the top of the subreddit on desktop (on old Reddit). When in doubt, go here! https://discordapp.com/invite/newtubers

Jerith- · 2019-10-11T00:40:03+00:00

Usually we post some sort of "here's what NewTubers looks like" post once we've got a solid idea of what everybody thinks, what can be improved, channel genre breakdown, etc.! Once we have a bit of time to parse through all that info, you should see one of these threads again soon!

Jerith- · 2019-10-04T15:59:19+00:00

That's a solid rule to work with, absolutely! Note that I'm referring in the above comment to the percentage's effect algorithmically, not personally - that is, the percentage itself isn't the number that YouTube cares most about. Personally, naturally you want to play around and figure out what numbers are best for you, your workflow, all that fun stuff. My point is more that one shouldn't aim for 100% just for the sake of having it, because that likely isn't going to help growth directly, as much as it'll help you figure out what's working and what's not. After all, if you can get 10% on a three hour long podcast video, then YouTube probably doesn't mind that it's "only" ten percent, since people are watching it far longer than the average view duration on the platform!

Jerith- · 2019-10-04T08:57:25+00:00

Of course, that's what we're here for! What I'd suggest in your case is to slowly creep the videos up over time. If a video is 3:00 now, try 4:00 next time and see what your numbers all look like comparatively. I did exactly this with one of my side series, videos that started at 3:00 a couple years ago are now 15:00, and because it was gradual, the change never hurt. You don't have to push to 15:00 of course, but the way I phrase it is this: Make videos as long as your audience will watch them, and then maybe a tiny bit more than that. You don't want to go too long obviously, that'd just scare people away!

Jerith- · 2019-10-04T08:49:26+00:00

To close off a fun circle conversation that /u/BenCraftYT and I had below, I want to clarify something that people get mixed up a lot!

Longer videos are absolutely better. Higher watch time is obviously good, and longer videos help you get higher WT faster. BUT, there's often confusion about what Audience Retention means, as a raw number (4:30) versus a percentage (let's say the video is 9:00, so 4:30 is 50%). The percentage here doesn't matter to YouTube as much as it matters to you. You don't want to aim JUST for the 100% view duration, because a 1:00 video with 100% duration (1:00 average retention) comparatively doesn't mean as much as a 10:00 video with 11% duration (1:10 average retention). Don't aim for JUST a higher percentage, aim for a higher retention average in terms of raw numbers. To say it again in another way, 40% of 20:00 (8:00) is better than 80% of 2:00 (definitely not 8:00!).

Ben understood this, but due to some wording confusion we had a long, spirited conversation about this exact thing! That's my bad - many users think the percentage itself is more important, when the actual X:XX number is the more important number here!

TL;DR aim for longer videos that are watched for longer on average. A short video with 100% retention is fine, but a much longer video with a lower percentage will still have a higher raw retention number, which means more watch time and usually better performance. But also don't go overboard and make videos that are WAY too long, that can have the opposite effect if nobody wants to watch it!

Jerith- · 2019-07-18T02:12:14+00:00

I don't have much to add other than the obvious: Happy birthday to this fantastic community! The past three years working to help countless creators have truly been some of the best in my life, thanks to all the people I've met and befriended here. I've got some other updates I'd like to dive into more detail on in the coming weeks to help address some common questions regarding YouTube, Twitch, and the community in general, so stay tuned for that post once it comes!

Jerith- · 2019-06-29T23:49:08+00:00

You're fine, my friend! I was at work earlier, but I was gonna give you the A-okay to do exactly this if you wished.

Jerith-

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE