Removing Low Retention Videos??

[KiddieToysReview]

Has anyone considered the strategy to remove/delete the lowest retention videos from their account?

Say you have 50 videos. A few have high retention, say 45-50%, and a few have low, say 20-25%. The majority are in the 30-35 range.

If you take away the 5 or so worst videos, your overall channel retention goes up? Would that then give your channel more authority overall, and place the channel overall higher in the algorithm?

Some of our earliest made videos have the lowest retention. The editing is not too good (me learning), the videos are way too long (4 min is enough, but they are 8+ long), etc. If I remove them, would the gain to the channel exceed the loss that those videos could generate in income down the line, if the channel gets popular?

 

[XboxDIY]

This is an interesting question. I noticed some of my statistics shot back up after I killed some of my very low performing videos (quite frankly, they were off topic and I probably shouldn't have made them). Might just be a coincidence given usually the spring break time frame results in more video views.

 

[KiddieToysReview]

Interesting XoxDIY! I assume the algorithm constantly calculates the channel overall retention, which is of course derived from all videos. Take out the few bad apples, and the data will no longer be skewed downwards. Would be interested to hearing from anyone else who has experimented with this.

Is there a way to take videos offline, but not remove them, to test the theory?

 

[CrazyPUA]

Interesting XoxDIY! I assume the algorithm constantly calculates the channel overall retention, which is of course derived from all videos. Take out the few bad apples, and the data will no longer be skewed downwards. Would be interested to hearing from anyone else who has experimented with this.

Is there a way to take videos offline, but not remove them, to test the theory?

Have you tried making them private? and see how this would pan out. I want to know this as I have some low retention videos too.

 

[PositivelyBrainwashed]

This is the first time I'm hearing the term "channel retention." Care to explain where I can check mine?

 

[Jayrod]

I was in your place not too long ago, I had about 50 videos at the time and I put some of my videos on unlisted and I think that helped clean up my channel! So in the end I think that it's a good idea!

 

[chottom]

The most important criteria is absolute watch time for the channel (it is first in your YT analytics).
Remove a video only if you really think it is very bad and do not match your significantly improved more recent videos.

 

[Jayrod]

The most important criteria is absolute watch time for the channel (it is first in your YT analytics).
Remove a video only if you really think it is very bad and do not match your significantly improved more recent videos.

I definitely agree with you! You need to also be careful not to delete more than you really have too...

 

[chottom]

I definitely agree with you! You need to also be careful not to delete more than you really have too...

Yup. I only removed some Japanese typhoon footage movies from our channel. Actually they had tens of thousands of views but they simply didn't have place on family/kids channel.

 

[KiddieToysReview]

This is the first time I'm hearing the term "channel retention." Care to explain where I can check mine?

I may have misquoted the name - it's under:
Analytics - Audience Retention - Average Percentage Viewed
I call it channel retention as that is the how much on average the audience views of the channel.[DOUBLEPOST=1458987854,1458987434][/DOUBLEPOST]

The most important criteria is absolute watch time for the channel (it is first in your YT analytics).
Remove a video only if you really think it is very bad and do not match your significantly improved more recent videos.

I have read so many posts on here saying audience retention is critical - if the video is not keeping viewers engaged it will not come up in recommended.
Absolute watch time takes no account of how much of the video the audience watched.
If a million viewers watched only 10 seconds of a 4 minute video, as opposed to one thousand viewers watching 3 minutes of the same 4 minute video, which video would YT pickup as more engaging - the one where viewers watched 75% or 1%? Which video would come up as recommended more? I'm not sure, I thought it was the one with higher retention?
I assume its the same when the channel builds authority - a channel that has 5% retention but millions of views, as opposed to one with 40% retention but fifty thousand views ~ which one is considered more highly by YT algorithms?