Understanding YouTube WatchTime

Monitoring WatchTime for YouTube video is the best way to build an engaging and, even profitable, video channel

YouTube has been around for more than a few years. So has the ability to link, to advertise, and to measure engagement. Developing WatchTime of your channel videos is a solid strategy for building an audience and even monetizing your channel.

A growing factor to monitor playbacks in YouTube is the watch time metric. Watch time represents the aggregate amount of time that people spend watching videos in your channel. It is available in YouTube Analytics. YouTube Analytics treat watch time as a primary metric among the standard metrics — impressions, click-through rate, views, and viewer watch time. Watch time influences the YouTube algorithm to optimize search results for videos that have increased their viewer watch time.

Watch time has a value to YouTubers in the same way as another advertising metric, dwell time, has for marketers and advertisers. Dwell time is the amount of time a customer remains in a venue, or in a specific area within a venue. The origins of dwell time comes from television’s golden age, but because YouTube videos can be seen on multiple channels, monitoring watch time is a meaningful proxy for dwell time. You can use it to audit how video content and its associated media is being consumed. That can be a particularly useful value signifier for a set of search terms that brought people to view video content