YouTube has added time watched as a ranking factor to reward or promote engaging videos.
The largest video sharing website announced the news on their official blog yesterday.
Now, YouTube is focusing more on watch time to rank a video higher in their video discovery feature. So, videos watched for more time will be ranked higher in Video search and Suggested videos.
Earlier it was ranking videos by the number of clicks, instead of time spent to watch. There are videos, people have clicked for millions of time and abandoned shortly due to the lack of interest or value.
They had experimented with the new ranking factor time watched and decided to implement it for better user experience. According to YouTube:
The experimental results of this change have proven positive — less clicking, more watching. We expect the amount of time viewers spend watching videos from search and across the site to increase. As with previous optimizations to our discovery features, this should benefit your channel if your videos drive more viewing time across YouTube.
YouTube has also added time watched statistics to the YouTube Analytics Dashboard. You can check your time watched statistics under the Views report. Look for the Estimated minutes watched. The more the time spent on the video and the lesser the clicks it attracted, the higher will be the ranking for video search and suggested videos.
So, the bottom line is – Focus on producing quality videos instead of clicks to rank higher in YouTube.
If you want to optimize your YouTube video better, then checkout this article – 14 Viral SEO Tips for YouTube Videos.
About Nandita B.
My name is Nandita B, and I’m a SEO practitioner and part-time blogger. My sheer passion for sharing knowledge a webmaster needs drove me to create “A Webmaster’s Magazine” called SEOHour.com
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Whoaa ! Finally YouTube has taken step to demote low quality/spammy videos. Till now people were producing FAKE views,likes,subscribers by using site like youlikehits in order to rank their videos on Youtube. Now,it’s gonna be harder to fool the video streaming giant.
Hayder recently posted…Fix green screen issue on flash-based videos
I think this is one of the best change Youtube ever brought to their ” video ranking ” system. Lets see which video moves to top..
Vivek recently posted…Top 5 Related Post Plugins For WordPress
Hi! Well there are not so many who have written about this new ” time watched ” on youtube yet..and it creats a lot of questions for me.
I have for exmple a video out on my channel that have 202 views, and it says 4 minutes whatched for the whole world; if I check for views in Italy there are 49 views and it says 179 minutes watched; 179 minutes are 179 x 60 sek = 10.740 sek; and 10.740 sek divided with the views 49 = 219,18 sek as an average of one view = 3 min ( 3 x 60 =180 sek ) + 39 sek = 3:39 minutes so to speak; the video is 3:32 minutes long!?
In Sweden I have 105 views where I have looked ca 20 % of those views..watching always from start to ending 3:32 minutes and it says zero ( 0 ) minutes watched, it means that I must be counted out and the rest of the 85 views have created zero minutes watched ( rather exceptionally ). For the other stats – about absolute interest I have ca 84 %, and realativly interest a high curv.
So how do I judge this new info about watched time!? Youtube analytics creaters knows but they won´t tell and we the users have to guess. Greet. Janne
jan edvinsson recently posted…Säj Jää! ( Say Yeah! ) / john sold
Hi! It´s me again just about an hour after I put my comment about ” time watched “; well I know that this time is not presented from dates earlier than the 1:st of sept. 2012; so in that case it would be impossible for the video I talk about here to have 179 minutes watched time in Italy since it only has one view totally in the whole world since the 1:st of sept 2012 until this date today 14:th of oct. 2012. Or is it an algorithm that estimates how an average view is viewed in Italy!? How about all those who creat a view but finds that it was not what they were looking for and creat just a few seconds watched; ten views with almost zero mintues ( or seconds )plus one that watch all the 3:32 minutes makes an average of 19 sek each ( a very low number anyway ); but that will tell me nothing about what interest the song is creating. So I would like know what this is in reality, and what I can use this information for. Has anybody have a clue!? Janne
jan edvinsson recently posted…Säj Jää! ( Say Yeah! ) / john sold