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Started putting a 10 second countdown at the top of my videos and my watch time went up 22% in 3 weeks
I kept losing viewers in the first half minute no matter how good the hook was, so I tried something dumb: a little countdown timer in the corner that said "real stuff starts in 10". No fancy edit, just text on screen. After posting 6 videos that way, my average view length jumped from 1:40 to 2:05 and two of them got picked up way harder than usual, one hit 80k views which is huge for my small channel. Has anyone else messed with a teaser like this, or does it just work because my niche is tutorial stuff?
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coray702d ago
That 10 second timer is probably just making people wait for a payoff that never comes, and YouTube will punish you once they click away faster on the back half. Six videos over 3 weeks on a small channel is way too small a sample to blame the trick and not just a lucky upload or two.
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julia_miller242d ago
Back in 2019 I ran a little gaming channel and tried the same thing, putting a 15 second countdown before every reveal. First two videos did great, one hit 40k views which was huge for me at the time. Then the next eight just died, like 200 views each, and my average watch time tanked hard. Turns out the timer worked on the curious crowd but regulars got sick of waiting and bailed before the good part. YouTube doesn't really "punish" you on purpose, it just stops showing your stuff to people who keep leaving early, and that adds up fast. So yeah six videos is nothing, you could get totally different results next month just from one upload getting picked up. coray70 is right that the sample is way too small to know if the trick is actually working or if you just got lucky once.
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