Short transcript of a Lauren Bateman video advising creators to check overall view counts but prioritize watch time. She recommends identifying videos that ‘pop’ relative to channel average, investigating title/thumbnail/CTR, and comparing watch time to other uploads because YouTube rewards longer watch time to sell ads.
The biggest thing to look at first is the overall view count. But understand that views is not the most important thing to YouTube. Watch time is. But when you look at your homepage and you see the videos you uploaded, you can scan through and see which videos maybe popped a little bit more. So if you release a video and after a week, Your average is 300 videos. But you release this one video and it got a thousand, that's a pop. Even if it got 500, it's still more than average. So you would want to take a deeper dive into that video and say, okay, was it the title? Was it the thumbnail? Was my click through rate higher on this? Because that might indicate that the title was better, the thumbnail was better. And then watch the watch time. How long are people watching videos compared to your other ones? Are people sticking around longer? Because YouTube tends to reward creators who make videos that get a lot of watch time. Why? Because YouTube wants to sell advertising. So the longer you can keep people on their platform, the better.
