To monetize your channel, your channel needs to cross 4000 watch hours total view. It is not easy to complete YouTube 4000 hours of watch time in a very short time but it is not impossible. For this, you should have some strategies to apply to complete 4000 watch hours in your channel in a very short duration. So, how to get 4000 watch hours on YouTube Channel? In this post, I have mentioned some ways to get 4k hours of watch time.
How to get 4000 watch hours on YouTube –
Well, there are numerous ways you can increase your watch time on YouTube. I will explain one by one, but before that, you should know what is the need or benefit of 4000 hours watch time on your YouTube channel.
What does 4000 watch hours mean on Youtube?
To answer this question let’s have a look at the below picture –
This screenshot is taken from official Google’s YouTube Adsense requirements page. Here it is clearly mentioned that you need to have at least 4000 valid public watch hours in the span of 12 months to qualify for monetization.
Besides 4000 watch hours, you need to fulfill other requirements too such as your channel should have 1000 subscribers; have no active community guideline strikes on your channel.
When you cross 4000 hours watch time and 1000 subscribers and follow other community guidelines you can apply google Adsense. Google will review your channel and if you meet their requirements they will display various advertisements. By displaying ads on your videos you will get paid by YouTube.
How to increase watch hours on YouTube?
Now let’s dive into the main topic of this post, i.e. how to get 4000 watch hours on youtube. For this, I have mentioned some strategies that will help you to achieve this goal.
Selection of a niche –
Before creating a YouTube channel it is important to choose a niche that your want to target. It should be based on your favorite subject or category because you will not get tired of making multiple videos on this niche. Your channel watch time growth is heavily dependent upon your passion or interest for a particular niche.
Also, you should research the niche with available tools before doing anything. I would suggest, you need to target those niche that is low competitive, has traffic, and has high CPC if you wish to take profit from this channel. I have already made a dedicated post on this topic i.e. high-traffic vlogging niches. If you wish you can check it.
Post quality content regularly –
Invest your valuable time and effort to make quality YouTube content for your audience and post it regular basis. Your first two or three videos may not be high quality but after continuously making content your video will look like pro videos.
Your audience always expects high-quality content from your YouTube channel. Here I am referring to the ‘quality’ word for both technical and non-technical, in technical it refers to high-resolution such as 4K, 1080p, 720p, etc., and non-technical refers to the main idea or subject. If you provide quality content, your audience will see your whole video and will share it on other platforms. The more you have visitors the more you have watch time. If you don’t maintain your high quality, the audience will lose interest in your video and it will affect your watch time growth.
Posting videos on a regular basis will not only get you views, as well as watch time but also help in ranking. Youtube loves those channels that post content regularly, so they rank their videos on YouTube. If you rank a video and it has search volume you will get more visibility and traffic you deserve and traffic means watch time.
Optimize your YouTube video –
YouTube ranking algorithm is getting complicated day by day and along with it the number of videos is also increasing very fast. To beat this you need to optimize your videos. So how do you optimize a YouTube video? well, there are several ways to do these.
Keywords research – One such way is keywords research and keyword placing on a video. Tools like VidIQ, Tubebuddy, Keywordtool.io are some of the best keyword research tools available on the internet. Also, you can use the autosuggest feature in the YouTube search bar to find out the other keywords.
If you want to find out your competitor’s keywords, to see for which they are targeting then you can follow the below-mentioned steps that I have mentioned.
For example, If your video is about “Manipuri traditional dress” –
Step 1- then search Manipuri traditional dress on the YouTube search bar
Step 2- Click the first video which has come after searching.
Step 3- then Right-click and you will see ‘video page source’ dialogue, click it.
Step 4- Ctrl + F and search “keywords”
then find the highlighted “keyword’ word, you will be able to see the keywords that they are targeting.
Keyword placing in titles as well as in the description also helps in ranking.
Add attractive Title & Thumbnail – A catchy title, as well as a thumbnail, is equally important as keyword research in optimizing a video.
A title summarizes what will be the video you have made, many times an audience will see the title then decide that, will it be worth watching it? An optimized title also helps a video to rank in search.
Instead of YouTube’s auto-generated thumbnail, you should make your own thumbnail because an auto-generated thumbnail will not be catchy as your custom design thumbnail. Thumbnails should be both mobile and desktop-friendly. The use of color and emojis should be standard. Be honest when you design a thumbnail, there should be a correlation between your main video theme and the thumbnail.
Don’t clickbait to attract attention, it may give your video a click but the audience will automatically close the video if they find out that there is no connection between the thumbnail and the main video and your average watch time will be reduced and it will also affect in your SEO.
Use YouTube cards- Have you ever come across when your favorite YouTuber asked you to click on the ‘i’ button by pointing out in the top left corner to see a video or link? and when you click that ‘i’ button you see a list of videos or website pop up, well i.e. called YouTube cards.
There are different types of cards you can use to customize your videos such as video cards, channel cards, playlist cards, link cards. YouTuber’s use these types of cards for many reasons such as to promote a new video, to keep an audience on their channel. By doing this he increases his channel watch time.
Use of end screen – End screens are the display of other video content that you add at the end of your current video to recommend them your other videos or playlists, and request viewers to subscribe to your channel. Your video has to be at least 25 seconds long to have an end screen and this can be added to the last 5-20 seconds of a video.
This is a great strategy to increase your watch time because an end screen will be seen when a particular video is about to end, an audience who will see this are those who actually seen the entire video; that means they are loving your video and the high possibility that the viewer loves to see your other content as well. So by adding an end screen have a higher possibility of the viewer clicking the video and increasing your channel’s watch time.
Create a playlist – A playlist means a collection of videos that can be played one video after one video. Generally, a playlist is created to help viewers to see videos that are correlated with each other. This is one of the best ways to increase your watch time.
Promote Your Videos – Promotion of your channel or videos is one of the most effective ways to increase your watch hours. Here, promotion means sharing your videos on other social media platforms. There are so many effective platforms available on the internet where you can promote your videos free of cost or by running ads, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, are some to name of.
I have made two dedicated posts on this topic, one is ‘best websites to promote your YouTube channel’ and another one is ‘best subreddits to promote YouTube videos’ if you wish you can check these posts.
How long does it take to get 4000 watch hours?
Well, there is no definitive answer for this query, because the growth rate of a channel is different from each channel; it may take you 6 months or 9 months. It purely depends upon the niche, time, strategy, recommendation by the YouTube algorithm. However, you can reduce your reach time by making continuously quality videos and promoting them on different platforms.
How to see watch hours on YouTube?
How do you calculate how much time a video is watched or the total watch hours of a particular channel? Well, it is very easy to see your YouTube analytics; just go to your channel YouTube Studio. You will see your channel dashboard, click the ‘Analytics’ button. There you will see watch time (hours) along with how many views your videos receive and the subscribers you have. Also, you can see separately how much watch time a single video has by clicking the ‘content’ button on the dashboard.
How many views is 4000 watch hours?
To answer this question let’s do the math.
First, you need to convert hours to minutes.
We all know that 1 hour = 60 minutes
Therefore, 4000 hours into minutes will be 4000 x 60 minutes = 2,40,000 minutes.
So if you have a 1-minute length video, it needs to be watched (full duration) 2,40,000 times to complete 4000 hours.
Do unlisted videos count as views?
Unlisted videos are those which are invisible in search results, suggestions, and subscriber feeds. Unlisted videos will be NOT counted toward the channel video views.
Conclusion –
You will complete 4000 watch hours in a very short duration if you apply the above-mentioned strategies. Also, If you have any suggestions for how to get 4000 watch hours on youtube? Please feel free to comment below.
