How to Increase Your YouTube Watch Time to Monetize Your Channel?

As time advances and technology reaches its zenith, more and more people are looking to online earning sources. With this, YouTube is becoming the most fascinating income source. Especially, Gen Z seems to be falling in love with YouTube for making their presence felt on a wider level. But is making a successful career on YouTube easy? Not that much! In a highly complicated YouTube landscape, you have to immerse yourself in sweat buckets to finally make a mark and achieve monetization.

Monetization is the ultimate goal of all newcomers on YouTube, and the means to achieve this end goal is improving your watch time. Believe it or not, it is equivalent to crossing a critical checkpoint on the road to YouTube success. Completion of 4000 watch hours is not a piece of cake. Many YouTubers take months and sometimes even years to achieve this milestone. However, with the assistance of top-notch YouTube management agency UnityFilms, you can pull off your monetization ambitions in no time.

You must now be interested in knowing the tricks for increasing your YouTube watch time. If that’s so, swipe down and see what it takes to make it in the YouTube world:

First, What is YouTube Watch Time

YouTube watch time is the total accumulated amount of time people spend watching your videos on YouTube. According to YouTube metrics, it is a critical factor that plays a crucial role in making your video rank high or low on YouTube, affecting your content’s visibility to a considerable extent.

How Watch Time Affects Your YouTube Channel’s Monetization

Without much exaggeration, watch time has the potential to singlehandedly prevent the monetization of your YouTube channel; after all, it is one of the essential prerequisites that must be satisfied before that. But wait, is 4000 watch hours really necessary to earn money from YouTube? Well, to be honest, 4000 watch hours is not the main thing when getting into a YouTube partner program. Why so? Because you can achieve that even with 3000 hours. You heard it right: 3000 hours, and you can now freely make good use of YouTube! If you want to earn through fan funding instead of ads, then 3000 hours is enough to get you into that. But keep this thing deeply embedded in your mind, as you still have to complete 4000 watch hours to generate ad revenue.

Powerful Tips to Increase Your Watch Time on YouTube

Just Be a Good Story-Teller

Watch time is all about making your viewers stay longer on your video. For that endeavor, what can work better than hooking your targeted audience on their screen by telling them a good story? It will keep them interested and engaged. Now, the question must be popping up in your mind: “How can I be a good and persuasive storyteller?”

Tell your viewers a jaw-dropping fact at the start of the video.
Don’t reveal too much in the starting phase. By saying this, I want you to put the information that your audience is waiting for at the end of the video.
Keep the element of curiosity alive from time to time in your video content.

Increase Audience Retention

You know what? The same tactics that increase watch time can help boost audience retention. Let’s explore some of those ways:

The first 15 seconds matter the most. It is at this critical time that your audience decides whether to continue watching the video or not. So, make them as engaging and as interest-arousing as possible.
Ok, the next important thing to consider is reducing the static element. Make sure to present variability in your video by changing camera angles, visual style, and music voice.

Create Longer Videos

Longer videos can be challenging to make, but they contribute much more to your watch time than shorter videos. Just picture a scenario in your mind: You worked on two videos; one is 6 minutes, and the other one is 12 minutes. After publishing, you found out that both videos got 50% audience retention. Then, where do you get more benefits? Definitely, in the longer video. You must be wondering: how so? Let’s say 1000 people watch each of the videos you uploaded. Now, apply simple mathematics here:

Video 1 (6 minute) = 50% watched= 3 minutes

Note: 1 viewer gave 3 minutes

So, how many minutes are given by 1000 viewers?

It’s 3×1000= 3000 minutes

Similarly, the other video (which is of 12 minutes) must have a watch time of 6000 minutes if 1000 viewers watched it half.

Just tell me where you make the most. Quite obviously, the video, which is longer, contributed most to your watching time.

Promote Your Videos

Don’t just rely on YouTube algorithms to promote your videos. Do some work on your own, too. Make some time out of your busy schedule to promote the videos you upload daily. Share it on your social media platforms. Go to relevant groups and look for the audience that could be interested in the content you are posting. Upon finding them, you can not only share your video in a group, but you can also leave the link to your video in their inbox. This way, you will be able to increase your video watch time enough to get your channel monetized.

Other Important Tips

Use playlists to increase the session time
Add a catchy title and descriptions, and do not undervalue the importance of a captivating, consistent, and customized thumbnail
Add video elements on the end screen to make it easier for people to discover the related content on your channel
Leave a link to a related video in the description or even in the comment section.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line of the whole discussion is that you can easily increase your watch time and get your channel monetized if you follow simple things that you commonly ignore. However, suppose you don’t have much time to focus on all that stuff. In that case, it’s best to delegate your task to a professional YouTube management agency like Unity Films– an agency that knows the art of increasing watch time on YouTube really well.

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