Exporting this topic from a Potemkin thread. Here's a bit of unsolicited advice re the videos and the credits for anyone who cares about how YouTube tracks views and makes recommendations. Do with it what you will. YouTube recommends videos not only by subject but also by popularity (total number of views) and also takes into account analytics. For instance, if people rewind your video to view part or all of it again, that's a plus but if they fast forward it's a minus. As such, for vignettes and short subjects the best approach is to have only the briefest title card and get into the story, then put your credits at the end and make them SHORT and quick. People can always pause the video if they want to read every name. Doing otherwise encourages people to skip ahead to get past the credits, to the potential detriment of your video being selected as a recommendation. Another "best practice" is to have a single version of each film up on YouTube so that all hits are aggregated on the one instead of spread across multiple videos of the same thing. I spent a lot of time tracking analytics on the music videos I've done, and it's fascinating to see the "attentiveness" curves. Sometimes you can tell exactly at which moment a lot of people switch off. Yes. It gives you all kinds of breakdowns, including which views are unique and which it thinks are repeats (based on Cookies). Here's a look at some YouTube analytics. Overall statistics... This video is NOT set to monetize, hence the $0.00 Estimated Earnings. Total views versus unique viewers... Mean average time people spend viewing each video... This one is interesting because it shows you if, on average, people are getting through your whole video. In this example, the average view duration in the US is 61% of the total (which of course means half of the viewers watch more than 61% and the other half less). This particular video has a 30 second end credit sequence, and I'm guessing most viewers click off and don't watch that, which impacts the overall average. I went to shorter credits sequences after noting this. Views by region...
Very interesting Maurice! Thanks for the time you spent on that. I had no idea about some of that information! Very informative.