Does your view count really matter?

LearningStuff

LearningStuff

I've Got It
Stupid question but as far as YouTube is concerned do total amount of views really count for anything? As far as I can tell watch time seems to be a much more important metric.

I get that view count DOES matter because more views=more watch time but to me it doesn't look like views is a metric that YouTube really cares about.

For instance if someone has thousands of view but people are only viewing their videos for 10 seconds on average they could actually be in worse standing than someone with hundreds of views but people are sticking around for 10+ minutes on average.

At least it seems that way to me.
 
It's a complex thing and probably something 'tuned with' by YT constantly but yes engagement is the key factor there.

Put bluntly, the more time people are engaged with your content the more ads YT can throw at them :)
 
CTR and audience retention/average view duration seem to be the most important ones when the YT algo determines whether to recommend your newest video 20k times or 200k times. You need a lot of likes, comments, shares and to some extent new subscribers as well, because videos that lack those engagement metrics don't get recommended as much either. To me, it seems there doesn't seem to be a universal winning formula to accomplish any of this, every channel has to find its own thing to get good metrics. Shorter videos definitely help, but in my case, I've noticed no difference between 9 and 17-minute videos, they all bounce between 30-40% audience retention.

Views seem to matter more for the channel's overall performance in the algo. To me, it feels like if at least one of your new videos doesn't get above-average views every 15-30 days, all of your old and new videos will be less recommended as a result, at least until you finally make a banger video and get into algo's good standings again. It's a constant push/pull chasing the algo, chasing your audience. I started taking to my viewers' comments and poll results into account when making decisions about my most immediate video topics, it seems to be working to some extent, I am getting more than double the views I was getting this time last year.
 
Keep in mind that I'm talking with no useful experience at all here BUT in my opinion I think its far more important to focus on your viewers wants than chasing the algorithm Sure the algorithm can (at least in theory) tell you whether you are providing the sort of content they are looking for - but only if you have a suffcieintly high number of viewers/subscribers to be statistically significant.

Read you viewer comments and take them into account. Can certainly be a good source of video ideas you may not have thought of too.

Well that's my $0.02 less tax.
 
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