Does not being monetized effect you in Search?

[binky VS bunson]

I'm not monetized. What's the point when I only have a little over 300 subs is the way I see it. Keep the fans from the hassle of ads is the way I see it, but do you think that impacts me negatively for SEO?

I always thought I was so cool cause many people try to monetize right away, but now I'm thinking Youtube might knock it against me for SEO because they can't put ads on it.

Anyone know the answer?

 

[Oscar J Stones]

I was thinking recently and I came up with a question. Is YouTube less likely to promote a video (eg. show in recommended videos, feature prominently in search results etc.) if a video isn't monetized? My reason behind asking is because it suddenly dawned on me that YouTube gets their money through advertising, so if you don't have advertisements on a video, surely they make less money; and if they do, then I'd assume they'd feature these videos less prominently. Is this the case?

 

[Riddikore]

Merged these two posts as they are pretty much asking the same thing.

 

[Doomkey]

They might make your reach less, but you have to remember you're really small. Who wants to sit through a 30 second advertisement when they don't know if the content is going to be worth it? They'll click away and go find someone else who isn't monetized so they don't have to sit through the ad. With proper SEO you can get your video way up in the first page of search results without monetization (I've seen it done before), but then you have to know how that works. I don't know how YT changes if you monetize, but I've only heard not to do it when you're small because 1) You don't make much money per video anyway and 2) it drives potential viewers and subs away.

 

[Sabrina]

Ah, I've been asking myself the same thing. I believe that if it is a factor in the ranking algorithm then YouTube wouldn't outright say so. The only thing I've read on the topic is speculation. And I don't think I've heard anyone on this forum say their rank improved after monetizing. You have to keep in mind that YouTube "spaces out" the display of ads to the viewer. So in that regard, non-monetized videos are valuable to them too?

BTW I just monetized one video. I chose the one with the most views and restricted it to overlay ads. In the dashboard under my name it now says "YOUTUBE PARTNER". Well, all right partner.

 

[ChrisLegend]

This is a really good question to be asking. Doomkey seems to have summarised it up perfectly, theres no point in putting on 30 second ads if you're smaller as people would seriously not be stuffed watching it. But what about just putting overlay ads on it? Could that also increase your chances in SEO? If anyone can shed some solid light and evidence on this it would be really helpful

 

[shreddedbullet]

I'm not sure. I disabled the skippable adds and only allow the card ads that don't play a video before my video.

 

[chottom]

Yes - it is a speculation but I think it affects the ranking. May be the contribution to the final ranking is only 0.5 or 1% but it does affect. And sometimes 0.5% higher ranking could be the difference between first (98,9% exposure) and second (1.1% exposure) YT search pages.

 

[xingcat]

I did a small experiment lately, with half my videos (the hair videos) monetized and the other half (anything with the puppets) not monetized. I've found that this hasn't affected my view numbers very much on any of the videos, but the retention rate on my non-monetized videos is much better. This isn't a great experiment, since my non-monetized videos are a bit shorter, on average, but it's interesting to see.