How does time and retention balance out?

Samantha Brown said:
One question that still puzzles me is Audience retention. Youtube gives you retention in minutes and in %. Which one matters more?
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It's hard to say. I personally believe they both matter. They are related like two sides of the same coin. If you've got 80% audience retention on a one minute video that's not as good as 80% audience retention on a two minute video. As the length of the video goes up the % can go down. You can have two videos on a similar topic with similar keywords and similar audience retention where one takes off and the other doesn't. That really has to do with which videos YouTube has associated your video with. Often if you're doing multiple videos on the same subject it's like YouTube let's your video take turn being in the lead feeding more views to one video then switching it out for another. In my opinion the perfect video for YouTube is not super short (under two minutes) but not super long (over 6 or 7) with as high a view percent as possible. It does vary by category. For example, there's no such thing as a ten minute movie trailer - almost all trailers are between 1-3 minutes. In the category I make videos in I'm convinced that the perfect length for me is between 4 and 6 minutes. I do believe that numbers gone down and YouTube is now favoring shorter videos (but again not too short). Hope that helps![DOUBLEPOST=1442269680,1442269316][/DOUBLEPOST]
WilliamRayWalters said:
hat's very interesting, assuming your source is reliable
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I can't share my source but I don't mind telling you what he does. He's a software engineer at a large analytics company that works with several MCN's. His entire job it too crunch the data from hundreds of thousands of channels (not sure if they get the data from the MCN's, Tube Buddy, or YouTube) in an attempt to reverse engineer YouTube's formula. So outside of someone that works for YouTube I'm guessing he's got the best handle of YouTube formula of anyone out there.

WilliamRayWalters said:
I've always kept my videos from being longer than 5 minutes, reasoning that it would be better for retention, and have had a good measure of success.
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I think that's smart. If you can make them longer without dropping the % audience retention then it doesn't hurt to but I think % audience retention is the most important thing to keep an eye on.

WilliamRayWalters said:
If videos shorter than 4 minutes lead to just as long viewing sessions, you would think that would gain them even more revenue, no?
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Yeah, it seems like it would. I'm guessing they've found that every time someone switches between videos there's a chance they loose them completely. Basically the end of a video is a convenient point to go to somewhere other than YouTube. I'm sure it's a balancing act and my understanding is YouTube is constantly adjusting their algorithm making minor changes but only release major changes a few times a year.
 
i think shorter vids are better, you can place 4 ads in front of four 5 min. videos.. you can only out one in front of a 20 min. video
 
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