Gaming The Algorithm: How To Get More Views On YouTube
As a musician, chances are you want to capture the attention of as many new YouTube viewers as possible. Here we look at how to use the promotional algorithm of the platform to your advantage, and ensure your video the prominence it's due.
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Guest post by Chris Robley of DIY Musician
If you want your videos to be recommended as much as possible to new viewers on YouTube, you need to appease the platform’s promotional algorithm.
YouTube’s primary objective — obviously — is to get viewers to stick around as long as possible so they can sell more advertising, so years back YouTube shifted its focus away from recommending videos with high view or thumbs up counts (because those stats can be easily gamed) and started favoring videos that encourage “watch time,” a more reliable metric for gauging real engagement.
In a recent post for Tubefilter, Matt Gielen shared some of the takeaways from his research into YouTube’s algorithm, including the following:
- Videos between 7-16 minutes in length perform up to 50% better than shorter or longer videos.
- Videos that get the most views have an average watch time of 5-8 minutes.
- No correlation was found between view count and length of title or description, or number of tags.
- A strong correlation was found between the number of tags and the number of creator suggested videos in that creator’s suggested video column.
