Outros vs Audience Retention

ZombieBrain

ZombieBrain

Always hungry!
Hi guys,

We all know that higher audience retention helps our videos get ranked higher and increases the chance to get into promoted videos.

Most of the guides recommends having an outro where You show glimpses of other videos and some specialists (like @Tim Schmoyer) say that this part of the video should be directed to new viewers, who are not yet subscribed, to show them what the value of Your channel.

I suppose that's all true, BUT doesn't having an outro lower Your audience retention for each video? I mean... a lot of people don't watch outros at all and Your subscribers probably won't either, since they have already seen it time and time again. So for example if Your video is 1:30 long and the last 30 seconds is Your outro, then You are in risk of losing 30% of view time.

What are Your thoughts on this?
 
YouTube looks at session watch time. You want an outtro because sure, they'll click away from the current video, but presumably to go to a new video of yours and watch that.
 
I say, make your outro long enough for people to see but short enough to not effect the video too much?

My outros are s**t but they're around 4-6 seconds long only. I have a card, say my thanks, ask for subscribers and even an annotation to a video which links to a playlist but no video preview (for now). Do people click on any of them? Some, but very little do. But yesterday, when I clicked on one of my videos, I saw that most of the suggested videos on the side are already my own. So I guess that's lucky of me and explains how most of the views from suggested are from my own videos.

Now do I have any significant drop offs on my videos? (I'll give an example of a normal looking graph for my videos) Answer is no. I see no apparent drop offs so yea 4-6 seconds is good enough for me. :)

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I have never used outro, no reason for it. For me it's very annoying since usually the music within the outro differs from what I listened to in video itself. Therefore it is an annoying sound.

Moreover, I always search for videos on the channel page and I do not care what someone puts in his outro.

For these reasons I do not use outro myself.
 
Maybe leave outros only on your long videos and skip the short ones. :) People do click away, but I think those that stay to the end are potential viewers that you'd want to convert into subscribers.
 
I always have outros and I use voice over to suggest things for people to click on, just a way for people to continue to watch my videos I guess.
 
I had a drop off rate in my ending clip that showed my previous video. Once I put bloopers instead, and the drop-off rate went away, and my views across other videos didn't decrease or anything...actually, nothing really changed, so I don't think my ending clip does anything. lol! I think *real* bloopers are good for video endings because they make it more personable and show that you are a regular person. ^^ I think in the future, I'm going to have cards advertise video suggestions, and I'll try to add in more funny outtake moments at the end. lol :p I'm not sure if that's a good YouTube idea or a bad YouTube idea, but it seems a little more relatable. ^-^
 
I think it's very hit and miss, I'm going to start putting them on my new channel as I found that I dd actually get some subscribers from my end cards on a different channel, not much but acquiring 25 subs across the videos when your overall is only 300 has got to be worth it. Also if they stayed for the entire duration of that video you have to assume they are a loyal and therefore very valuable viewer
 
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