Does Audience Retention matter?

[Cookie6]

YES YES YES. Audience retention is one of the main factors of if youtube promotes your video or not. Low retention usally means a video is clickbait or not interesting, so youtube won't promote it. From what I've seen a good rat is 30% and up. Mine is currently at 51% and youtube heavily boosts my videos all the time even though I'm a small channel.

Just looked at your channel and wow! 92k views on your 2nd most recent video?! That's crazy man. So I see then it must sort of correlate with what YouTube wants which would make sense.[DOUBLEPOST=1528455174,1528455057][/DOUBLEPOST]

So I never know what to do with my analytics of my videos. I'm so new that the numbers probably aren't very good to use. I feel like the higher the retention, the better. What it means to me is that they stay on the video longer, which probably means better content? I guess if someone only viewed a video for a short amount of time it might imply that it is a clickbait video and not actually worth staying on.

Yeah pretty much. It's gotta be that way hasn't it?!

 

[Crown]

Imagine you have the retention on 70% or higher. How Youtube will promote your content and app.

Videos with relatively high audience retention will be more likely to appear high up in the search results and in the suggested videos list.

 

[Ezrider92356]

audience retention is very important. its also a very good tool to improve your video's look for where your audience retention is high and where its low and try to determine what people like in your videos and what they don't. then make improvements to your future content/editing to create better video's.

overall watch time seems to be promoted more than high % though. iv got a video that is over 15m long with only 36% audience retention that does better than a 2 min video with 73% retention.

but that being said if you cant keep someone watching on a 2 min video a longer video is going to do even worse. however I am finding that video's under 5 mins seem to do worse because its harder to get enough watch time on them to be promoted

 

[Gaijillionaire]

I think those who ay 30 and up is good are right. Though I cant understand why a low percentage is so good. If it was a test 30% would be terrible. Same with 60% but if i video has 60% returntion its a hit! I just don’t understand!

 

[Ezrider92356]

I don't consider 30% good but on a longer video it can be acceptable every video is going to have people that click it and its not what there looking for so they click away within a couple seconds witch really hurts the average watch time. then you have people that skip around the video just looking for the 30 seconds of the video that they are most interested in the good thing is youtube has collected this data across billions of hours of video so I think its pretty good at picking up good video's

the audience retention is a excellent tool to use to collect data for yourself to improve your video's as well.

 

[InTheDogHouse]

I think I’ve read mine right ? Mine says 71%

 

[ProXima123]

Yes, through the audience retention the youtube algorithm can judge weather a video is more suitable as recommended videos or not. Audience retention is more important than views, I believe.

 

[Smartie]

I believe it matters so much. I have a video that has 62%, its growing rapidly as we speak. I have another that is 34%, its not gaining as much traction, but still decent. The higher the better.

 

[Gerald Z]

I'm still trying to figure out what that word even means!

 

[AlexLee]

You dont have enough views yet to really know for sure. Its a numbers game, and the smaller the sample size, the less confident in the results. However 41% view time avg is very good. Most sit 30% or less unless your doing an educational or a prank type videos and stuff.