We noticed that the 70-minute videos were receiving far more viewership in the first two days than the other videos, despite being mainly repurposed library videos. “A channel that Frederator works with in the kids space was uploading three to four videos per week of varying lengths (three minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes and 70 minutes). The article points out that this is just a single anecdote, with no data behind it, but it's still a stunning story: Just Making Your Videos Way Longer Works Too It dips back down after 8 minutes, though, so that appears to be the sweet spot.
On Channel Frederator this year, videos with an average View Duration of over eight minutes brought in an average of over 350% more views in the first 30 days than those under five minutes.” This metric carries a lot of weight and our data suggest that there’s an obvious tipping point. View Duration speaks to how long a viewer spends watching an individual video. “The next biggest metric we found to have a significant impact on the algorithm is View Duration. The reverse is also true: Post a video that only gets under 5% of subscribers to watch it, and your next videos will be pushed to a smaller number of your subscribers. Essentially, there was a direct correlation between the percentage of subscribers who viewed in the first 72 hours and a video’s life to date viewership.” Poor View Velocity Impacts Future Videos The research “found with a near 92% accuracy we could predict whether a video would perform well for us based on its View Velocity. Since a high velocity indicates a lot of potential for growth, the algorithm will promote the video faster to milk it for all its worth. The velocity refers to how quickly you pick up views within the first few hours or days after an upload. To get the YouTube algorithm to care about your channel, you first need to clock some solid watch time. Instead, it's a combo of these six factors: Views, View Duration, Session Starts, Upload Frequency, Session Duration, and Session Ends. Watch time does not mean time watched (confusing already, right?). Here's what Jeremy Rosen and Matt Gielen found out about the YouTube algorithm after six months studying the YouTube channels at Federator. Now, thanks to an in-depth article from Tubefilter, a few researchers have reached into “a very big and very dark black box with very limited data” and pulled out a key insights. The rest of the media world has the exact same problem with Facebook, so they can empathize. For YouTube celebrities, one big problem constantly hovers overhead: Their careers are dependent on a faceless, unknown YouTube algorithm.