If you want to make money with your YouTube channel, you have to meet two important requirements first before you can apply.
First one, Get 1000 YouTube subscribers for your channel.
Second, Gain 4000 hours of watch time within the last 365 days.
That is what we are going to focus on today.
We are going to look at your watch time from three different angles:
How many videos, you should make to get there?
How many views does each of your videos get?
Duration of a Video.
WHAT COUNTS AS VIDEO WATCH TIME?
The first thing that you have to understand is what qualifies as watch time?
Not all content is equal. YouTube only considers PUBLIC watch time as watch time. That means, if you set the privacy of one of your videos as unlisted or private. You could get a million hours of watch time, and it wouldn't count!
Keep that in mind when you upload your videos onto YouTube!
Once you qualify for monetization, you can apply for monetization. And once you're approved, you're approved. No matter how many hours of watch time you accumulate afterward.
Example: If you got monetized one year ago but only had 1,000 hours of watch time within the last 365 days doesn't matter. You still stay monetized.
WHAT'S THE BEST STRATEGY TO GET TO 4000 HOURS OF PUBLIC WATCH TIME?
What’s the minimum number of videos that you should make? How many views should each of your YouTube videos get? What's the ideal length of your videos?
To answer these questions, we have to do a bit of math first.
1 X 1-MINUTE VIDEO
Imagine that you just created a brand-new YouTube channel.
Day 0. You have 0 subscribers and 0 videos.
What if you created just one 1-minute video. How many times would people have to watch this one video to gain 4,000 hours of watch time?
The answer is pretty simple.
We just have to convert 4,000 hours into minutes. 4,000 hours x 60 minutes = 240,000 minutes.
One 1-minute long video would have to be watched 240,000 times.
Wow, that's a big number!
It gets even bigger if we assume that not everybody will watch your video all the way till the end.
The first person might watch for 1 minute, the second person might watch 30 seconds, and the third person might click away immediately.
What's the average watch time? (60 seconds + 30 seconds + 0 seconds) / 3 people = 90 seconds / 3 people = 30 seconds / person.
In other words, 50% of the total video length.
In reality, 50% would be a pretty good result for any video shorter than 10 minutes.
For longer videos, 30% or more is more realistic.
With our 1-minute video, 50% average watch time would double the number of required views.
240,000 1-minute views / 50% = 480,000 views!
Yeah, we are not going to do that.
We need something way more achievable!
365 X 1-MINUTE VIDEOS
Ok, so what if we made one 1-minute video every day instead?
How many views would we need?
Let's take our previous number of 480,000 views and divide it by 365 days.
And yes, I am simplifying a little here: The first video you upload on day one has 365 days left to gain more views. While the last video that you upload on day 364 only has 1 day left to gain more views and should therefore get a much smaller number of views. In my examples, we just pretend that all videos are the same.
LET'S BE REAL
Now, all of these numbers make sense on paper, but they might not work in practice. For once, coming up with good video ideas takes time and requires mental energy to be creative. If you want to make 365 unique videos that are all equally good, you might burn out pretty quickly. And not just because you drain your creativity daily (unless you live stream video games on Twitch), but also because of the time spent on production, editing, and promotion, which can easily take up a few hours per video if you want to do a good job.
What's a more realistic option that would work for most people?
Create 1, 2 or 3 videos per week. Each 10 to 15 minutes long. Create either a weekly or monthly livestream of 60 minutes. Focus on content quality and promotion.
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