Audience retention advice?

ZaphodX

ZaphodX

I Love YTtalk
My videos are around 15-40 minutes long and I'm at 30% watch rate and average watch time = 8 minutes. I thought this was good but I've seen people who claim 60% or even 70% retention rates.
This seems extraordinarily high to me!

Can anyone give me guidance on what is good/normal/acceptable for audience retention, and whether my stats are ok for the type of videos I have?
 
Unless you have totally proven your content is amazing, people will never sit down to watch 40 minutes of any video of yours. Try to stay within 10-15 minutes, and make sure to get the attention early on. If you have a funny moment 5 minutes in, but you're boring the first minute, nobody will stick around. It's like what your English teacher always said: have a grabber in your essay to keep the reader entertained. Same with YouTube videos.
 
ZaphodX said:
My videos are around 15-40 minutes long and I'm at 30% watch rate and average watch time = 8 minutes. I thought this was good but I've seen people who claim 60% or even 70% retention rates.
This seems extraordinarily high to me!

Can anyone give me guidance on what is good/normal/acceptable for audience retention, and whether my stats are ok for the type of videos I have?
Click to expand...
Make shorter videos
 
I think Mike hit the nail on the head... If you're getting those results from that long of videos, you're doing great...

However, I would also shorten em up a bit. Sometimes when I am watching a tv series on NetFlix, that is 22 minutes my ADD kicks in... These are heavily produced and mainstream programming.

I just could not imagine watching 40 minutes on YT of someones videos unless they were SPECTACULAR. I think the average YTer is down for a 2-3 minute experience tops.

I'd trim the fat a bit, take em down to 10-15 minutes tops and I bet you'll see a rise in retention. Best of luck to ya.

~Dylan
 
ZaphodX said:
My videos are around 15-40 minutes long and I'm at 30% watch rate and average watch time = 8 minutes. I thought this was good but I've seen people who claim 60% or even 70% retention rates.
This seems extraordinarily high to me!

Can anyone give me guidance on what is good/normal/acceptable for audience retention, and whether my stats are ok for the type of videos I have?
Click to expand...
Any video length under 15 minutes usually keeps people's attention and let's them see all of your content. I think if I uploaded a video that was 40 minutes long and people only watched for 8 minutes, I would be sad that they all missed 32 minutes worth of content!

Usually viewers will stick around if the video is between 1 and 10 minutes long. I'd suggest segmenting your 40-minute plays into 10-minute chunks. This could give you more potential to upload more videos as well.
 
ZaphodX said:
My videos are around 15-40 minutes long and I'm at 30% watch rate and average watch time = 8 minutes. I thought this was good but I've seen people who claim 60% or even 70% retention rates.
This seems extraordinarily high to me!

Can anyone give me guidance on what is good/normal/acceptable for audience retention, and whether my stats are ok for the type of videos I have?
Click to expand...
15 minutes is very long.. unless you are a film.. 40 minutes is crazy long.. Could you cut your stuff down to under 10 and make it part's 1, 2 ,3 and so on? then release them over a course of time I think you will see your viewership go up and your retention go up as well.
 
yeah my videos are long and thats 8-12 minutes 30 is way too long unless its really necessary
 
Two points.

1) Make a great intro to hook viewers in. Most people recommend just taking the best 10 seconds of your video, copying it and pasting it in front of your video. This gives a highlight, showing how awesome it is and makes people want to stick around.

2) Have annotations that can take the viewers to another part of the video, if they get bored. Make the annotation say something like (click here at any time to jump to the blah blah part of my video!). If they lose interest, they'll jump to another part of your video rather than another video altogether, meaning an all-around higher audience retention.
 
If you're getting 30% retention on videos THAT long, you're doing fine.
As others mentioned, if you could edit your videos to 7 or 8 minutes,
you would have a higher rate plus you could spread out your content
to help your view-count as well.
 
Mine is sitting just above 75% but this is because I make videos that are between 5-15 minutes, I always try to stay within those guildlines because personally when I'm watching let's plays and COD commentaries I feel 15 minutes is the max I can watch a video for before I start to think I need to do something else (15-20 minutes is also the break a lot of people have from doing other things) so if you're videos longer then that the people watching might just not have the time to sit through the whole video :)
 
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