BSVP On-Site at SES Chicago with Greg Jarboe, president of SEO-PR and author of “YouTube and Video Marketing in one hour a day”. Bruce Himmelblau discusses how YouTube has added Watch Time to it’s ranking algorithm. Watch Time is the amount of time a viewer spends watching a particular video which is accumulated and considered in how high a video will rank. Greg also pointed out that YouTube is second to Google as the top search engine and currently has over 800 million unique visitors a month.
Businesses that are not using video as part of their marketing strategy have a good chance of loosing sales and customer to those who have a strong video marketing strategy and use YouTube or other services to engage their current and potential customers.
Before YouTube introduced the “Watch Time” algorithm, it was primarily based on the number of people who clicked on the video. However, those seeking higher clicks used “black hat” tactics to get people to click on their video, such as misleading thumbnails. This prevented videos with useful content with higher engagement from getting ranked or promoted by YouTube. The affect of including the cumulative amount of time that a video is watched is that the videos will appear more in the related and recommended sections and will benefit both established as well as brand new channels.