Last December 04, 2019, the YouTube Maintenance Team published an update in the YouTube Community page about the results of their latest routine audit of channel subscribers.
The update gave notice that a higher than usual number of closed and spam accounts have been purged and removed as compositions of subscriber count for some YouTube channels. The purpose of which, is to make clear the related metrics used by the YouTube search engine in ranking the channels of nearly 2 billion active users.
TeamYouTube further explained that regularly validating user accounts for genuineness and legitimacy is necessary. Doing so keeps the YouTube social media platform a fair and impartial Internet space for everyone who participates in the video-sharing activities. They also gave assurance to video uploaders that since the team only removed user accounts verified as closed or spam, the “Watch Time” related to their videos is not affected.
YouTube users who want to find out if their channel was included in the periodic purge can check their YouTube Analytics page. They can access it via the YouTube Studio and find the details by clicking on the “See More” prompt under the graph. The Subscription Source – Closed Accounts will show the closed and spam accounts that have been excluded from the count.
Is the “Watch Time” Metric More Important Than Subscriber Count?
Some years ago, the YouTube search engine received modifications on the algorithm used for ranking videos and channels. The change denoted that the search engine bots are to give greater weight to Watch Time over Video Views and Subscriber Count, when ranking the content and channels for search visibility,
Understanding the “Watch Time” Metric
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The “Watch Time” metric is the length of time spent by active users in viewing a video. If a user clicks on a certain video and stays on it for at least 60 seconds, this is a watch time that adds value to the visibility of the YouTube content and its channel. As opposed to watch time that lasts for only one or two seconds, a short watch time suggests that the content did not provide the information being searched for by a YouTube user.
Although subscriber count is important, the number of views in addition to watch time has greater weight. A YouTube content may not have a huge number of subscribers to show; but if it has a greater number of views to combine with “Watch Time”, then the visibility of that video is further enhanced.
Nonetheless, improving one’s subscriber metric, especially for videos that furnish quality content is essential because competing for visibility is a tough challenge. The “Watch Time” and the “View” Metrics all depend on the video creator’s ability to come up with content that will result to longer and more frequent engagement with a channel. Increasing subscribers is not as easy, because it depends on every viewer’s decision, on whether or not they will respond positively lo calls for subscription action.
It takes time and more video content to grow the number of audience that decides to subscribe to a channel; yet there is a quicker way to go about it. Struggling YouTube users, particularly those relatively new to the video-sharing platform, avail services offered by social media marketing experts. SMM-World for one, offers resources aimed at increasing YouTube subscriber metrics with genuine and legitimate accounts.