Does My Own Views Effect Watch Time & Retention?

[SeanFace101]

Does my own views effect such things as watch time, etc...? I'm talking about the views by me wen I'm doing something to my video, editing settings, etc.. I clike on my video then click to edit settings, cards or whatever, but that view of mine that only lasts a few seconds or so, does it harm the stats about my video such as when YouTube tracks how long people watch my video? And if so, then will this harm my rankings for that video?

 

[KiddieToysReview]

From what I've read, and experimented with, it counts up to the first 300 views.
After that YT anti-bogus-views subroutines kick in and anything from your locations/devices is not counted.
So it does help to open 20 chrome tabs, arrange them nicely on the screen, and run your new video through them to get 100% retention There's no reason any new video should have less than 300 views in the first few hours.

 

[magnamious]

From what I've read, and experimented with, it counts up to the first 300 views.
After that YT anti-bogus-views subroutines kick in and anything from your locations/devices is not counted.
So it does help to open 20 chrome tabs, arrange them nicely on the screen, and run your new video through them to get 100% retention There's no reason any new video should have less than 300 views in the first few hours.

Yeah but how does that benefit you at all? You're just watching your own videos over and over again

 

[KiddieToysReview]

Yeah but how does that benefit you at all? You're just watching your own videos over and over again

One theory goes like this - your 100% view retention on the video counteracts any low retention views form sub4subbers who visit your channel and watch your video just long enough to write a "great video, come visit me" comment, which is usually under 30 seconds. Once normal traffic picks up the sub4subbers have little effect on retention as they are outweighed by viewers from search and suggested, in addition to regular subscribes who view that video over the next 1-3 days. This is just a theory, though.
I had a look at your last 3 videos, you don't have any sub4sub comments. As a toy channel we usually get 30-70 sub4sub messages in the comments within the first 12 hours, and most of those are very low retention views. So need to have strategies to offset that. YT doesn't seem to mind as they give you a 300 views free pass. Would love to find another strategy. But anyways I've been doing it much less lately (I think the last video I ran 4 sessions) as the channel builds overall authority a handful of crappy views doesn't make much of an impact overall.

 

[subversiveasset]

I probably wouldn't go as far as to do what KiddieToyReviews, but it's true that up to a certain point (I don't know if it's still 300, however) your own views count toward your retention. So, please keep in mind -- any time you're watching a video on the Retention screen, or on the annotations or cards or edit page...that counts! If you're replying to a comment from the video watch page (so the video is playing), then that counts! So if you're going in, making a quick change, and then going out...that counts! It's best to just let the video play through so you don't get dinged.

However, overall, you should be working to get enough traffic from others that your own views shouldn't have as much of an impact in the long run.

 

[KiddieToysReview]

However, overall, you should be working to get enough traffic from others that your own views shouldn't have as much of an impact in the long run.

Exactly. When we started the channel, for the first 3 months the views mainly came from our subscribers and sub4subbers, so many videos had horrible retention, the channel overall something like 20%. I could just see the s4ss coming in, watching 10 seconds while they cntrl-v their comment, and bounce out. I think that killed a lot of our earlier videos.

Then I read here about the 300 views and gave it a try, but the max I ever did was about 30 views. The retention from where we are was subsequently 100%, from the worst offending sub4sub countries it was 5-10%, and from the US/Canada usually 30-40%. So our own views balanced out the low quality views.

As the channel grew and YT took care of sending traffic over, the s4s have little impact now on retention stats.

But savvy sub4subbers realize the importance of a full-watch now, so we get the following types of messages as enticements to visit their channels:

"congratulations ,, I watched full time….have a nice weekend .. Pls,, Everybody, SUBSCRIBE my channel"
"Cool video big like and watched in full Come check out our super fun full case of 72 Kinder eggs unboxing"
",Thumbs up!! I watched full time. .have a nice weekend .. Pls,, Everybody, SUBSCRIBE my channel?"
"so funny I watched it in full Let's check my channel liked!"

 

[SeanFace101]

I probably wouldn't go as far as to do what KiddieToyReviews, but it's true that up to a certain point (I don't know if it's still 300, however) your own views count toward your retention. So, please keep in mind -- any time you're watching a video on the Retention screen, or on the annotations or cards or edit page...that counts! If you're replying to a comment from the video watch page (so the video is playing), then that counts! So if you're going in, making a quick change, and then going out...that counts! It's best to just let the video play through so you don't get dinged.

What so when I'm adding annotations and replaying parts of the video over and over if I'm trying to get the timing of a annotation correct, with cards too, those views count even tho its within a section / page of the video's settings?

 

[Idec Sdawkminn]

From what I've read, and experimented with, it counts up to the first 300 views.
After that YT anti-bogus-views subroutines kick in and anything from your locations/devices is not counted.
So it does help to open 20 chrome tabs, arrange them nicely on the screen, and run your new video through them to get 100% retention There's no reason any new video should have less than 300 views in the first few hours.

Interesting. So, what about posting a really long video and doing this same thing with it? Would your average minutes watched stat go really high? If it did, would that actually affect anything beneficial?

 

[KiddieToysReview]

Interesting. So, what about posting a really long video and doing this same thing with it? Would your average minutes watched stat go really high? If it did, would that actually affect anything beneficial?

Theoretically it should work. Depends how many views you have overall though. If all your other videos have 100k views, but you only generated 300 views on the long video, it probably won't matter much. Yes the overall watch time goes up and so does the retention, but your views on the 1 video are outweighed by many more views on the other videos. Basically should work if you are a small new channel, but the more traffic you have the less impact you can have with 1 video.
There was a thread months ago about what would happen if you delete your lowest retention videos, would your overall channel retention go up? The answer was a yes. This idea is in similar category to that.
Whether it help anything is a different question - it depends how many factors the engineers at YT coded into the algorithm. Is this a scenario they anticipated? If yes, then you can't use this to boost anything. If they didn't consider this, then perhaps that's a small loophole to exploit while your channel is young and small to get some killer (skewed) stats.

 

[SeanFace101]

Yeah but if you have a long video and play it till the end and the watch time on that video will increase and because of this the channels overall stats will go up too, but will it not still only benefit the long video that you played out rather than helping all the other videos too?

or does a Channels overall retention and watch time help all the videos on the channel?