Focus on Audience Retention or 10 min videos?

[Zijin_cheng]

I'm quite late to the Youtube optimization game and have recently learned about audience retention and Youtube ranking 10 minute videos higher than shorter videos. I'm trying both but since doing both at once is hard & audience retention is hard, I'm tried focusing instead on making sure my videos are 10 minutes which means sometimes talking about nothing or prolonging a certain aspect.

My question would be: Would a 5 minute video with better audience retention be suggested/promoted by Youtube more than a 10 minute video with average retention (I'm currently at about 30% for all my videos)? I've got titles, tags, and descriptions more or less down, so I usually rank decent in search results.

 

[DigiBox]

Neither, focus on creating good content.

 

[Zijin_cheng]

Neither, focus on creating good content.

Well obviously. Can someone with more insight comment to the actual question above?

 

[Steven&Cilla]

Do both. In order to get good audience retention you need to hook your viewer right away, usually within the first 10-15 seconds and make them wanting to stay. Next step is you need to make sure you have good content otherwise people will click off if they get bored. Look at your audience retention and figure out where they usually click off of the video. Then figure out why they clicked off in the first place.

 

[Zijin_cheng]

Do both. In order to get good audience retention you need to hook your viewer right away, usually within the first 10-15 seconds and make them wanting to stay. Next step is you need to make sure you have good content otherwise people will click off if they get bored. Look at your audience retention and figure out where they usually click off of the video. Then figure out why they clicked off in the first place.

At this point in my channel, I don't think I can make an engaging video for 10 minutes. I would like to focus on retention first, I'm just wondering what the impact of a 10min vs 5min video is? Is it worth the tradeoff?

 

[EVO]

Watch time is king. More minutes watched the better.
So 30% of a 10 min video is better than 50% of a 5 minute video.

 

[Steven&Cilla]

At this point in my channel, I don't think I can make an engaging video for 10 minutes. I would like to focus on retention first, I'm just wondering what the impact of a 10min vs 5min video is? Is it worth the tradeoff?

What ever you do, the key is keeping the audience engaged. Try it out with 5 min videos for a week or two. See if your retention goes up. I think a good retention score is at least 40-50%.

 

[Life of a Film maker]

If you dont have audience retention they wont be making it past the 10 min mark anyway

 

[TYTD]

obviously I'd suggest making good content above all else...if your ideas wont stretch to 10 minutes without being watered down then dont stretch them out... but I'd suggest Gateway videos; they're best of both worlds...you make 10 minute videos generally but then drop the odd 5 minuter in along the way to hook the more casual viewer in.

 

[Andie_the_Lab]

that 10 minute mark is really important, but only if you are working with adsense

If you know you can bang out a stellar 5 minute video and you aren't working with adsense - then do that first. imho