. I want to thank you for that. One question that still puzzles me is Audience retention. Youtube gives you retention in minutes and in %. Which one matters more? How should I treat what these tell me? I find this utterly confusing. If making good content was all that mattered, then theoretically, the higher my audience retention in per cent is, then the more views that video should get (all my videos are in the same key word group). But I have videos with only above average to average audience retention in per cent that sky rocket into big hits, and then I also have videos with high % retention all the way through but these videos only a few tens of thousands of views. So I began thinking that perhaps audience retention in minutes is what matters the most, but that logic drives me down a road of making loooong vids for no reason and that doesn't seem logical either?
That's very interesting, assuming your source is reliable (and based on my next sentence I have no reason to believe it's not). Something definitely changed at the end of August that affected a handful of people here, primarily gamers. Gamer videos are generally longer so what you said would make sense. To me it always seemed as if they've promoted short videos over longer ones, though. That's just been my experience both on my channels and from what I've seen. Personally, 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.
Yes, they always have. I talked to a former Google engineer about a year ago who told me he laughs every time he sees a video of a Youtube programmer talking about the algorithm and always speaking in terms of improving the 'viewer session experience' as if that's really their primary goal, because the primary focus has always been the ad revenue generated during that session (they're both very important, and generally one begets the other, but the bottom line is revenue). He said that in addition to (obviously) not being able to talk in any real detail about the algorithm, that his NDA states that he can never mention anything about revenue being used as a factor when constructing/adjusting the algorithms.
