Over the last decade on YouTube, creators and programmers have looked at various metrics to judge our online video successes and failures. And have sought out actionable insights that can help get more of the former than the latter. If you’ve been reasonably active on YouTube at all in the past 10 years, you know these metrics are always in flux. Figuring out what works and doesn’t work on YouTube – and the kinds of content the powers that be at YouTube want to work and not work on the platform – has been like trying to get trying to hit a rapidly moving target. It used to be that we could have our sights set on view counts and subscribers. Now it’s much more complex, subtle, and sophisticated.

That’s where Watch Time comes in.

YouTube representatives and personnel regularly cite “Watch Time” as an “important metric to promote videos on YouTube.” It’s so important to YouTube, in fact, that the Watch Time analytics section is given prime positioning on any given creators’ YouTube Analytics dashboard. It’s pushed the “Views” graph down on the analytics page. Take a look.

Watch Time is the new black.
Watch Time is the new black.
And YouTube even removed “Views” entirely from the side menu, putting Watch Time in its place.

Respect. The. Watch Time.
Respect. The. Watch Time.
This, of course, means Watch Time is what YouTube wants us (the creators and programmers) to focus on most. Or, more importantly, if we want to be as successful as possible on YouTube we had better make Watch Time our #1 priority. But what exactly is Watch Time?

Watch Time = Views x Average View Duration

If you go by the numbers in the Analytics section on YouTube’s dashboard, Watch Time is simply the total number of minutes people have watched your videos. Take your “Views” and multiply them by your “Average View Duration” and you’ll get your “Watch Time.” That actually makes the metric not that valuable to creators from a programming standpoint. It’s just the direct product of two other metrics. You can’t impact, change, or optimize for your “Watch Time” without impacting, changing, or optimizing for its components. The metric is cool to have, I guess, but it’s kind of meaningless. One of its components, however, is not.

Average View Duration is incredibly meaningful. Average View Duration is essentially how long on average people are watching your videos. I believe that Average View Duration is the most important metric of all, as it speaks directly to what those powers that be at YouTube state that they want. On the YouTube creator blog, in the post “YouTube Now: Why We Focus on Watch Time” Eric Meyerson, Head of YouTube’s Creator Marketing Communications, writes:

“…the average household also watches several hours… per day on their TVs. So for YouTube to become the most important media in more people’s lives, we’ve got a lot of growing to do.”

It’s evident that YouTube wants to compete with television for your time and attention (and therefore ad dollars). In order to do that, YouTube optimizes all of its promotional video algorithms (the videos that you see when on YouTube’s search pages, in the Suggested and Recommended videos sections on the site, etc.) to feature videos that keep people watching longer. This is why Average View Duration is extremely important and the results of the algorithm tweaks have been impressive. But don’t just take Meyerson’s and my word for it, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has touted the stat in the press, too, saying how overall Watch Time on the site has dramatically increased year over year.

Therefore, we as creators and programmers need to pursue “Watch Time” if we want to succeed on the platform. And that means optimizing for Views and Average View Duration. But there’s another caveat. When YouTube says “Watch Time” it doesn’t actually mean Minutes Watched (even though that’s what it says in analytics). There’s more to it than just Views and Average View Duration.

What YouTube really means by “Watch Time” is this: How often and for how long do your videos bring people to YouTube and keep them there? To figure that out we need to look at the four hidden metrics factored into “Watch Time.”