Recently YouTube set out new requirements for monetizing your channel. At the moment, you can monetize your channel when you have at least 1000 subscribers and watched 4000 hours. For smaller bloggers, they may be hit hard. The truth is that hitting 4000 watch hours and 1000 subscribers is not an easy target. Fortunately, there is a way around this. There are different techniques and strategies you can use to increase the watch time. These are tips to help you.
Determine Your Watched Hours
The first thing you should do is to determine the number of watched hours. You can find this in the Creator Studio. Check on the analytics and check the number of hours for the last year. You will find the minutes users have spent watching your content.
Post Regularly
A great way of increasing the YouTube watch time is to ensure your content appears in the search result. In any case, more views result in more watch time. So, what is the best time to post your videos on YouTube? Recent studies have shown that the right time to post your video is mid-afternoon. This gives your video adequate time to get indexed. You should note that most people watch YouTube at around 8 PM.
During weekends, you can post earlier, and you should consider the times when the traffic is quite higher. Always avoid posting on Mondays.
Utilize Playlists
Are you aware that people do not have to watch the video to increase the watch time? For instance, if a viewer begins to watch your content and then keeps watching the playlist, you will get watch time whether the other videos belong to other channels. Therefore, you should ensure all the videos are on playlists. Take your time to create playlists and feature other popular videos alongside yours.
Use End Slates and Cards
After uploading your videos to YouTube, there are different tricks that can help you to keep watching the video quite quickly. An important feature to consider is the YouTube Cards feature. With this feature, you can add on-screen links to other videos, playlists, or channel.
When using cards on the existing videos, you should look at the analytics and check the view time for the video. In this way, you can identify the point most viewers leave your videos. At that point, you can insert a card to offer the viewer an opportunity to watch your playlist, related videos, or another video. The good thing about this is to keep the viewers on the playlist or channel and thereby to increase watch time. You can also use End Slates to direct viewers to your other videos. Ensure you add subscription links at the end of the video.
Use a Teaser
The truth is that viewers can easily get bored when watching YouTube videos. This probably has happened to you. You can avoid this by having the most exciting and best part of the video at the beginning of the teaser. In this way, your viewers can know what to expect and will keep watching your content. Although views will keep going down, your watch time will keep increasing.