Message to YouTube Creators to Use Audience Retention Every Single Day

How Zoella uses a hand to focus the camera

Twenty years ago I started teaching, and if I had Audience retention back then - I would have been a million times more effective.

In a regular lesson, I had to position myself in the classroom so I could always see every child. It's called risk management - you may stop children throwing stuff, fighting or even falling asleep.

But if I was at the board with marker in hand talking fractions, there was a tiny chance some learning may break out.

Posts in the Audience Retention Series

3 Dec 14	Audience Retention Explained via Motorola's The Maker
2 Dec 14	Advanced YouTube Audience Retention for Creators
25 Nov 14	Martin Van Buren at 103%
24 Nov 14	Taylor Swift at 94%
11 Nov 14	Your Channel’s Learning Potential
25 Oct 14	YouTube Reveal Audience Retention
11 May 14	Message to YouTube Creators

Teachers, and don't they know it, get embroiled in assessment - it's a nightmare. Marking books, adding comments, planning the next lesson and guessing (if they the teacher) have been effective.

That's why YouTube Audience Retention is genius. It let's you see immediately what percentage of a video has been watched along with a realtime scrub bar as the video plays.

For my videos, I can tell which parts appeal to my viewers. usually, this is when I show a data slide. I compare this to map directions. Put simply, you want to know what road you need and when to turn.

I'm a modest creator who wants to appeal to as wider an audience as I can. Which means cutting back on bloatware like unnecessary words (or even any spoken words at all), wasted seconds anywhere in the clip, my face (who needs that!?) and certainly any begging for subscribers or likes.

My content should stand on it's own two feet and that means taking a strategy you would expect from a military briefing. I want the viewer to turn up, learning something as fast as possible in easy steps, then leave.

I need to do this in as shorter time as possible, use the simplest route (cutting back on wasted graphics) and most importantly, provide the viewer with something they can remember (and therefore action immediately).

+YouTube Creators and +YouTube Creator Academy and pumping out more help than will fit on a small island, but I really think far too many creators pass this information by. That's a real shame.

But the good news is YouTube is changing for the better. +Susan Wojcicki's now in charge and I'm so impressed. You have to be living under a rock not see see how the planet is lighting up with +Michelle Phan, +Bethany Mota, +Rosanna Pansino and from the UK, +Zoella & +Tanya Burr.

These five creators I've just mentioned are their own TV Corporation. And I'm already cringing as to link these five to TV is not a really compliment, it's a stab at the old school guard, who have no real clue what YouTube even is (or how powerful it has become).

For example, in the UK +ITV have a new breakfast show, Good Morning Britain, that's losing viewers by the day. They employ a bus load of people and pay the talent tons of money. Then we have +Zoella making one upload (all by herself by the looks of it) and getting 1.1 million views.

What's for sure, Creator Analytics are a closely guarded secret. I would love to know what the Audience Retention (and watched minutes) is on any top creator. /edit - of course we do know now, see my post of 25 Oct 14, in the table above.

One recently told me, he gets 3.3 million watched minutes per month (and with that comes Adsense revenue shovelled into your bank account).