What does “4,000 watch time” on YouTube mean?
4,000 hours of watch time for YouTube means people viewed your videos for a total of 240,000 minutes. I’ve been a YouTuber since 2013. I got serious about YouTube in 2017, as my chart indicates below. It was in mid-2017 when my channel was monetized.
Losing monetization
I lost monetization in Feb 2018, and I was aggravated. I wasn’t making much from YT, but once you make it, you don’t want to give it up. It has taken me a year and a half to get monetized (2016 to mid-2017, and I only had 536 subscribers. My watch time was 8K, double the annual requirement, but I only had 1/2 the subs I needed.
How do you get to the 4K threshold and over? You make quality content and you keep making great content and do the tips I suggest below.
What YouTube wants
There are over 30,000 hours of new content uploaded to YT every hour! How do you compete with that much content? Your content must be engaging and relevant, and you have to keep putting content out.
I had quality content (8K hours), but I made a lot of dumb mistakes. My video title and description were horrible. My descriptions were usually only a couple of sentences. I didn’t even have tags, or if I did, it was just one or two tags. That doesn’t cut it. Also, I never told people to subscribe to my channel. I assumed they would.
YouTube wants to know that you are going to stick around. If you make 10 to 20 videos and quit, which is what a lot of people on YouTube do, YouTube’s algorithm isn’t going to promote your videos. Your content has to be good, and you have to publish consistently. I read where it takes on average 150 videos to get to 1,000 subscribers. That sounds right. For me, it was more videos because I wasn’t doing the proper things.
Five Changes I made in February 2018
Remember, I just lost monetization
- I worked on my title names
- I added long descriptions
- I added tags
- I told people to subscribe during my videos
- I added a subscribe button on my videos
Results of the changes
On June 24, 2018, I received an email from YouTube with an animated GIF. It showed I had 1,000 subscribers. Back to being monetized.
Here is my monthly growth by subscribers from July 2018 to the present. YouTube sent me another email when I hit 10,000 subs in May 2020. I have 11,600 right now.
Keep publishing quality content, and do the five things I mentioned above, and you will get to 4K. There are other things to do, but no one wants a 20 point list. I covered the major stuff you can do all within YouTube.
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