Not so long ago, YouTube opened the average view duration YouTube statistics. Now you can easily and openly evaluate the effectiveness of a video. We decided to compare the duration of viewing various advertising and viral videos.

Channel administrators have long had access to very detailed statistics on their videos, including information about views and their duration. Often this information can be very interesting and suggest certain thoughts. For example, a user who has uploaded a video will probably be interested to know why, for example, in Russia, his video is watched on average 30 seconds, and somewhere in Italy - more than two minutes. If you take into account the total number of views and adjust for misclicks, views from irrelevant audiences, and so on, you can get comprehensive data, understand errors and correct them in the future.

To view information on the duration of viewing, you need to click on the statistics icon under the video, select the Time Watched item and, in fact, take a look at the Average View Duration indicator.

According to YouTube rules, it is up to the user who uploaded the video to give or not to give the public access to statistics, so it is not possible to see the indicators of many popular videos. Many marketers and agencies are reluctant to publicly display the results of their work, especially in case of failure. In addition, it seems that YouTube has only been collecting statistics for the last couple of years (we could not find the exact data), so only the number of views is available for older videos.

But there are more than enough new videos whose authors have allowed viewing of statistics on YouTube, so let's take a look at some of them.

Capital Rune

In January of this year, a viral video from the Smetana agency for the Runa Capital venture fund noticeably stirred up the audience, gathering a variety of responses, from enthusiastic to purely negative.

The main audience of this video was foreign Internet users, so the video in English was promoted, including on TechCrunch. Despite the fact that there were a lot of negative reviews, everything is very good on YouTube itself - with more than 860,000 views, only 412 dislikes. And the average viewing time is 53 seconds, with the length of the video itself 1:13. We must admit that this is an excellent indicator.

Read legally

Affect created a viral video for a special anti-piracy campaign in Read Legal.

The video was posted at the end of March 2013 and has garnered nearly 380,000 views to date, and with a video length of 32 seconds, an average view time of 28 seconds is an excellent result.

Smart

The BBDO Moscow agency has developed a promotional video for the Smart car. The video was published in May and since then it has been viewed by about 7 thousand people. The length of the video is 2:04 min, and it is viewed on average 1:31 - also quite a decent result.

LinguaLeo

Previous videos have shown good average viewing time. However, this is not always the case. This is confirmed by another video from the Smetana agency. The virus for LinguaLeo, published in early July, has collected more than 5 million views in the first few days, and now there are already more than 5.6 million.

But, if you pay attention to the statistics of the duration of views, then everything is far from being so rosy. With a video length of 1:02, the average watch time is only 6 seconds. This means that the vast majority of viewers close it immediately, and therefore do not belong to the target audience of LinguaLeo.

From all this, we can draw a simple conclusion - it is important to interact with the target audience. Millions of views that are only a couple of seconds long before the user has time to close the video is not the result you should strive for, and with the discovery of statistics on the length of views, anyone can evaluate the effectiveness of a particular video.

How to increase average view duration on YouTube?

Add clipping to your videos

We are moving on to such a concept as clipping . This is an approach to creating content when the same plan (angle) is kept on the screen for no more than three seconds.

The first minute of a video for many Western bloggers may contain only 18-20 seconds of narration in a video with a talking head, and the remaining 40 seconds of b-rolls. For them, it is quite a normal situation when there are 20 b-rolls per minute of video.

Imagine that these 19-20 pieces need to be shot organically, in the subject, specifically for this video, and then mounted in such a way that it looks beautiful. Further, of course, the number and volume of b-rolls decreases, since we have already involved the viewer in viewing, but they are, and there are quite a lot of them. Using 50 b-rolls for one 10-minute video is quite a common practice for successful Western YouTubers.

Now imagine that all this needs to be removed and mounted. Imagine how long it will take. However, people who approach content in this way will most likely not take off some kind of “hat”. They will understand that the cost of time is colossal, so they will approach the choice of topic more thoroughly. Also you can use next tactics:

• Intrigue by watching the first video. For example, you can add a cut of the highlights from your video.
• Add visual features to your videos - captions, pictures, thematic details and other elements. This step will help diversify the video and make it more interesting to watch.
• Change the music depending on the theme and mood.
• Use the call to use to encourage visibility to like or subscribe to your channel.

Build micro-locations to shoot different shots

Build micro-locations in your home or studio where you will shoot different shots and b-rolls. See where you can stay. For example, you can place a chair in front of a window and shoot with natural light. You can shoot at the computer, at the kitchen table, or you can sit on the floor somewhere in the living room, opposite an interesting closet.

You can shoot some passages. You can also set up shooting, for example, your hands separately or the keyboard. These will already be different micro-locations that will add clips and add show elements to your content.