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A couple weeks ago I published what I considered to be the single greatest achievement in the history of mankind. I went on an amazing fishing trip, we saw a bunch of stuff that we've never seen before, I caught an almost-record fish and a species that I had never caught before. It was... epic.
So when I edited the near 4 hours of footage down to 28 minutes I deemed this a video worth the elongated run-time (my videos are normally about 15-18 minutes) and I hit publish. And then the analytics started rolling in. And they were sobering. Due to the abnormal length of my video viewers were skipping past the first minute of the video and picking up towards the end of the video. Also, I dragged out the end a little longer than normal and viewers were clicking away en masse before the video was over. My analytics reflected a very distinct drop in viewership at the very beginning and the very end of the video. Judging by prior videos I needed this one to get around 40% AVD in order to be a channel driver, and it was sitting at 29%.
I rewatched the video and it was evident not that I had dragged out the beginning and the end. So I chastised myself for the careless, egotistical mistake and I decided to pursue drastic actions in order to salvage my video. I opened the YouTube Studio Editor.
This thing is a nightmare and a last-ditch effort. Suffice to say I am not a fan. The YouTube editor is in place because after a video is published you can not make changes to it (as with any medium you can only publish a finished product). But due to copyright issues etc you can make adjustments to aspects of the finalize product... like putting a blur over the video or muting a moment. That doesn't change the video. It is rudimentary, but necessary for some of these cases. In my case I needed to make one very simple change that the YouTube editor provides.
I trimmed the beginning and the end. It hurt. To me the change took away elements of the video that I was proud of. They helped to tell the story, they were moments to me that I did not want to lose. But they had already proven not to work, so I trusted the analytics and I trimmed about 8 seconds off the beginning and nearly 20 off the end.
The results were monumental. That 28 seconds removed the two most detrimental moments in the video. My intro still suffers a bit because I wasn't able to provide a catchy hook, but the number of viewers who see the end of the video has tripled. Also, check out this boost in Browse:
The video wasn't dead, but it wasn't the channel driver I wanted it to be. This simple edit hurt my pride but it actually increased my AVD to 33% and while that is not the number I am aiming for it does represent a significant increase and that spike is what caused this bump in traffic. Hopefully the AVD will continue to increase (new views with longer watch time will offset the initial views which are currently ragging down the total AVD). I have seen this before; subscribers sometimes are not into a video that I make but they watch and comment because they are being nice. This happens fairly often when I do a how-to video. The subscribers want to see a fishing vlog, not a reel-repair tutorial. So initially the retention sucks but after a couple months of ranking in search the video will gain watch time and retention and eventually hit its stride.
The beauty of this method is that you can go right now and implement it on your entire library. Use it as a means of learning what your audience wants to see; it really hurts to cut up your already published videos like this. But check your retention graph; if you see these drops at the beginning and the end this can make an immediate impact for you.
So when I edited the near 4 hours of footage down to 28 minutes I deemed this a video worth the elongated run-time (my videos are normally about 15-18 minutes) and I hit publish. And then the analytics started rolling in. And they were sobering. Due to the abnormal length of my video viewers were skipping past the first minute of the video and picking up towards the end of the video. Also, I dragged out the end a little longer than normal and viewers were clicking away en masse before the video was over. My analytics reflected a very distinct drop in viewership at the very beginning and the very end of the video. Judging by prior videos I needed this one to get around 40% AVD in order to be a channel driver, and it was sitting at 29%.
I rewatched the video and it was evident not that I had dragged out the beginning and the end. So I chastised myself for the careless, egotistical mistake and I decided to pursue drastic actions in order to salvage my video. I opened the YouTube Studio Editor.
This thing is a nightmare and a last-ditch effort. Suffice to say I am not a fan. The YouTube editor is in place because after a video is published you can not make changes to it (as with any medium you can only publish a finished product). But due to copyright issues etc you can make adjustments to aspects of the finalize product... like putting a blur over the video or muting a moment. That doesn't change the video. It is rudimentary, but necessary for some of these cases. In my case I needed to make one very simple change that the YouTube editor provides.
I trimmed the beginning and the end. It hurt. To me the change took away elements of the video that I was proud of. They helped to tell the story, they were moments to me that I did not want to lose. But they had already proven not to work, so I trusted the analytics and I trimmed about 8 seconds off the beginning and nearly 20 off the end.
The results were monumental. That 28 seconds removed the two most detrimental moments in the video. My intro still suffers a bit because I wasn't able to provide a catchy hook, but the number of viewers who see the end of the video has tripled. Also, check out this boost in Browse:
The video wasn't dead, but it wasn't the channel driver I wanted it to be. This simple edit hurt my pride but it actually increased my AVD to 33% and while that is not the number I am aiming for it does represent a significant increase and that spike is what caused this bump in traffic. Hopefully the AVD will continue to increase (new views with longer watch time will offset the initial views which are currently ragging down the total AVD). I have seen this before; subscribers sometimes are not into a video that I make but they watch and comment because they are being nice. This happens fairly often when I do a how-to video. The subscribers want to see a fishing vlog, not a reel-repair tutorial. So initially the retention sucks but after a couple months of ranking in search the video will gain watch time and retention and eventually hit its stride.
The beauty of this method is that you can go right now and implement it on your entire library. Use it as a means of learning what your audience wants to see; it really hurts to cut up your already published videos like this. But check your retention graph; if you see these drops at the beginning and the end this can make an immediate impact for you.
