Ok... here is a little break down of the Views Per Hour metric. Mind you; I have zero hostility when it comes to VidIQ and nothing against their tools or what they do. I am simply going to take a look at the specifics of this tool.
Views Per Hour is an attempt to look at a fairly significant metric that YouTube uses to determine impressions for your video... this is actually referred to as View Velocity. In the first few hours, days and even weeks after a video is published YouTube is testing it out on various audiences and different demographics in an attempt to see how well it performs. And your View Velocity plays a large role in the number of additional impressions YouTube is going to allocate for your video going forward.
But that information is not something that YouTube gives us... and the Views Per Hour is not giving us the whole picture. The metric is simple; take the number of days a video has been live, divide that by 24 hours in a day and then divide the number of views it has received by the number of hours it has been live. The problem here is that this is an overall average and doesn't actually show velocity.
In the recent VidIQ video about this metric Rob discusses videos about unclogging a toilet and makes comparisons between an 8 year old video and a recent video. He is comparing the view velocity between these videos as a means of showing you which one appears to be growing faster and ideally this would be a really cool metric. But what if the 8 year old video had a level of virality seven-and-a-half years ago and then never got another view? Views Per Hour would be reflecting a very erroneous point of view regarding the value of that video and it should not necessarily be one to compare against. The Views Per Hour, though accurate in a vacuum would not be representing the actual velocity of what is effectively a dead video.
Another thing to consider... I'm a number's nerd and a stat-geek as much as anyone else. But there are only so many numbers that are actionable with YouTube. That is to say that there is data that YouTube looks at and there is nothing you can really do to target that information and make adjustments to benefit your channel (if you care to dive into this topic look up YouTube's P-Scores as an example). Your View Velocity... well you can't really affect that. I mean, you can affect it by improving your video content and thumbnails which will garner a more positive response from your audience which will signal YouTube to give more impressions, which will get you more views and therefore a higher view velocity. But you can't look at your derived number of views per hour and make an actionable change as a result of this data. And if you could... would you want to? If you had a Shorts video hit 100,000 views over a weekend and then die on a Monday would you want to be comparing your other videos to the views per hour that video reflects and if you did... what exactly would you be comparing?
Don't get me wrong; I like seeing metrics like this. But I do not foresee our developers spending time in order to simply copy a VidIQ tool... particularly when the end result provides little actionable benefits. I will say that I commend VidIQ for a neat feature and I do not mean to speak negative to it; but we have some cool stuff in the works and I would not want to put aside the projects our developers are currently working on in order to implement this on our end.
