Youtube views are dropping

PANIC

Yesterday ReelSEO posted a blog about the latest research from ComScore. To summarize the total views on Youtube have dropped steadily over the last few months to an incredible 16 billion views for April 2012. In January it peaked at 22 billion views.

Run for the hills ?  

What the research also highlighted was the minutes spent watching the films, in January 2012 74 billion minutes were spent watching films whereas by April 2012 this was 62 billion minutes.

Although the data reflects a drop, there is a subtext.

Check your Relative Audience Retention 

The sub text 

In April 2011 the average time spent watching a film was 3 minutes. By January 2012 this was 3.40 minutes but by April this had risen to 3.95 minutes  (I know, I know there are only 60 seconds in a minute but stick with me)! That's almost a whole minute in a year.

Your average viewer is finding relevant content quicker and engaging with it. 

The Absolute Audience Retention shows the % of total views
your film is getting. 

Let me translate

It's all about creating great content. This research enforces the fact that engagement overrides views and Google wants this. If someone engages with your film/channel they sell more adverts. Google can target specific adverts designed to fit that content. Simple. If someone clicks onto your heavily key worded but irrelevant film, doesn't engage with it and then comes away from it again then no-one benefits.

Ranking Update

To summarise the challenge - we have a film about knee pain which we are using to get this page on knee pain to rank higher. When we took control of the film it ranked 146th on Youtube - it now ranks 10th.

How do I get my online video onto Google ?

Getting your film up Youtube

Last week our film on knee pain  was ranked 14th on Youtube (it was 146th when we started optimizing it)  - it has now climbed another 3 places to 11. 11th out of  21,700 search results isn't bad (but we want to do better). 

Engagement:

I spoke last week about sharing (blog) this week we have started engaging. There are simple ways of doing this - all we did this week was to place our film as a video response to another successful film. We used one of the other films we have on the knee brace .

The key is to find a film that is related to your film and ask. Not every channel will accept you, but, if your content is relevant then you do have a chance. Remember Youtube is a community much like Twitter - contact people, chat with them, help each other out. Google likes real people.

We're doing it for the people

In the past a lot of Webmasters put their effort into getting their pages to rank on the Search Engines - which meant that often the content was designed to rank but not inform. Google have acknowledged this so are now rewarding people for content designed for the visitor.

We approach film in the same way, as you can see from the graph above, our visitors are visiting the film and more than 60% of the initial visitors are staying with it until the end slate. 

Ranking 

To summarise the challenge - we've been given the term 'knee pain' and we're using film to get this page on knee pain to rank higher. According to Google Keywords the term 'knee pain' has medium competition and 673,000 monthly searches world wide. The page currently ranks 7th on page 1 of Google.  By using film we're creating original content, trust and authority - three key elements that Google love.