In the past, views were the most important metric for video marketing performance and channel success. Because of this, a lot of offers for their cheating have appeared on the market. It is useless to buy youtube watch time usa now, and here’s why:
The counter calculates and removes invalid views, which is why it works with a delay.
YouTube is interested in user retention, and a large number of views does not guarantee this. 1 view of 10 minutes is better than 5 views of 60 seconds.
For artificial views, you can get sanctions or blocking the channel. Likewise — with any other markups: mutual subscriptions, likes purchases.
In the «Academy for Authors» it is written in black and white: «The rating of each video and channel on YouTube depends precisely on the viewing time — the longer users watch a video, the more often it appears in search results and recommendations.»
At the same time, the owners of YouTube channels can still see the relationship between the number of views and good ranking, which is absolutely normal: as a rule, views correlate with watch time.
Fun fact: YouTube takes into account not only watch time, but session length as well. A session starts when a user visits the site and ends when the user leaves. If the viewer does not follow external links after watching the video, but stays on youtube.com, the channel receives a bonus watch time.
Playlists, tooltips, and end-screens are very helpful in locking the viewer into the YouTube ecosystem.
Reactions: likes, shares, comments, subscriptions
YouTube, like all social media platforms, pays close attention to audience engagement. The Backlinko team found a connection between the high position of a video and the number of reactions: likes, shares, comments and subscriptions caused by this very video.
Now more about each social signal:
Likes indicate that users like the video: most likely, YouTube takes into account such reactions. However, “thumbs up” can also affect rankings indirectly: it is possible that good data on views and watch time is “to blame” for everything.
John Mueller, a lead analyst at Google, denies the impact of social media shares on search engine rankings, but video hosting may still take them into account. One way or another, if a person shares a video with friends, most likely, he watched it to the end — that is, everything is in order with audience retention.
Comments are a strong indicator of engagement. Here, even without complex research, everything is clear: the user was not too lazy to write, which means that the video caught him. By the way, stormy commenting happens not only under the holivar videos: a good example of stimulating the audience is Yuri Dud’s contests.
The growth of subscriptions after watching a video is a sure sign of the quality of an individual video and content on the channel as a whole. The plus for the site is that this indicator is more difficult to wind up. Tip: do not forget to urge to subscribe to the channel at the end of the video, place the link with the call-to-action in the tips and description.
