6 Ways to Generate 4,000 Hours of YouTube Watch Time FASTER!

If you’re a YouTube creator who wants to monetize your content through Adsense revenue, you’ll know that one of the metrics and If you’re a YouTube creator who wants to monetize your content through Adsense revenue, you’ll need to have generated 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on your channel over the last 365 days. We’ll be covering subscriber growth in-depth in a future post, but for now, let’s focus on watch time and the importance of building it through your content.

4,000 hours watch time = 240,000 minutes.

That’s a lot of minutes, but we’re going to give you some solid advice on how to get your videos watched by more people and get you to that goal faster. We’ll also let you know which TubeBuddy tools will help you.

#1 Video Length and YouTube Watch Time

You may think that the longer your video, the higher the watch time hours.

That’s just not true and may even backfire if your analytics are reporting that viewers are dropping out before the end of the video. YouTube is looking at those metrics, and the more viewers who abandon your content, the less likely YouTube is to serve it up to more people on the platform.

It may be a much more successful strategy to create shorter videos that people watch longer than making a long video where people click out only 20% of the way through.

How long do your videos need to be? The answer is as long as they need to be to get the point across. Being able to condense and package up your videos in the shortest amount of time possible will significantly benefit you.

#2 What’s the Deal With YouTube Shorts and Watch Time?

If we’re suggesting that you make your videos as concise as possible, should you be creating Shorts content instead of longer-form videos? Not necessarily.

Any subscribers you gain from your Shorts will count towards your goal of reaching 1,000 (the other metric you need to qualify to join the YouTube Partner Program and become eligible for monetization).

BUT the watch time generated by YouTube Shorts, especially if they’re served to viewers via the Shorts shelf, will not count towards your 4,000 hours needed. So keep creating Shorts if that’s the kind of content you love to do, but remember they won’t contribute to an increase in watch time.

#3 Audience Retention Metrics are Your Friend

If you have been publishing videos to your channel, you’ll have some performance data to work with, giving you feedback on how your content resonates with viewers.

There are several tools that both YouTube and TubeBuddy have that can help you with things like audience retention and drop-off rate.

On YouTube, you can access your audience retention analytics via YouTube Studio. Just click on a published video and click ‘Analytics.’ From the new dashboard, click on ‘Engagement’ to access the data you need. Look out for ‘Typical Audience Retention’ and ‘Key Moments for Audience Retention‘ metrics. We’ll be taking a deeper dive into these reports in a future post.

If you have a TubeBuddy Legend or Enterprise account, you have access to our ‘Retention Analyzer’ report, which will tell you how many people are still watching your video at various time intervals, e.g., 30 seconds or 60 seconds in.