San Francisco — The days of using thumbnails to drive clicks to your bizarrely created YouTube videos — thereby placing them higher in the search results — are over. Now, in a bid to boost the time users spend on the site, YouTube today announced that it will adjust its search rankings to prioritize videos that viewers actually watch.
The Google owned video-sharing hub disclosed in a blog post that it has just commenced adjusting the ranking of videos in YouTube search to “reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching.”
Eventually, if YouTube users regularly watch three minutes of one video but routinely click away from a similar video after a few seconds, that three-minute video will rank higher in search results going forward, despite keywords. In other words, if the vast majority of users watch your video all the way through, it will perform better in the search rankings. Naturally, this works two ways: it gives those who produce good content more exposure, while it keeps people engaged on the site longer.“This is a continuation of ongoing efforts to focus our video discovery features on watch time, and follows changes we made to Suggested Videos in March, and recent improvements to YouTube Analytics,” YouTube said in a blog post.
However, the latest initiative makes it more tough to game the system by choosing a provocative thumbnail image for your video in an effort to drive clicks. Instead, creators will be rewarded for actually getting viewers to watch the whole video. It adopts a similar change the Google-owned company made to its suggested videos feature earlier this year. “These changes better surface the videos that viewers actually watch, over those that they click on and then abandon,” the company said at the time.
As a matter of fact, in testing these new rankings, YouTube said the result is very much positive “less clicking, more watching.” As a result, time spent watching videos will likely increase over time and boost the profile of those with popular videos.
If you are not sure how your video is performing, YouTube has added a “Time Watched” reporting tool to YouTube Analytics. We reported on the Analytics changes here. In the “Views” report, YouTube will now show you more time watched data. “Estimated minutes watched” can be seen from this report now, and users can choose other data options from the “Compare metric” drop-down.
“So keep making great videos that your fans will love and share, and encourage them to discover more of what YouTube offers, and you will see your own fan base grow, too,” YouTube said.
In fact, keeping people on the site longer means more advertising revenue for YouTube, so it is a win-win situation, so long as you are among the content creators who are putting out engaging videos. YouTube says on the Creators Blog that it has “started” to adjust search engine results in this way, so it sounds like this feature will see a gradual roll out over the coming days.