Why you shouldn't trust Watch time, Retention Time, CTR etc..

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Watch time, Retention Time, Average Video Duration, CTR... 95% of the time, these metrics are just bullshit & pure noise unless you understand something simple but very important. Don't trust me, let me prove it to you with one of my videos that crossed 1M+ views Read 👇

I have hit the million mark on my videos a lot of times in my career. Not for my clients, not for someone else, for me. 99% of creators never reach this milestone, and from the 1% left, very few try to understand how they did it. They just enjoy it.

Trust me I spent a loooot of time studying my content. (you have no idea how many hours I've put into it) And before we start you need to understand two very important principles that will help you understand my point.

1⃣ Fooled by randomness A concept from the book of the same name by Nassim Taleb. This is when you try to make sense of randomness by finding patterns in it while in reality there aren't.

2⃣ The narrative biais This is the tendency to interpret information as being part of a larger story or pattern, regardless of whether the facts actually support the full narrative. Basically, it's when you know when it started and when it finished but not what's in between.

In this case, you know when a video was uploaded & what's the results in terms of views, but how it happened is so complex, with so many factors involved, that it can't be explained through numbers only.

This is very important to understand because people would rather accept a wrong explanation than admit that they don't understand. Don't get fooled, or it will drive you crazy.

This is why I almost NEVER use these metrics in my strategies. I'm a full-time YouTuber since 2015 and I rarely check my analytics because most of it is just pure noise. I've built for myself strategies analytics-free that work way better.

Now the theory is cool, but let's back it with some solid facts. Let's play a game: One of these videos has 1.4M views, the other has 500k (almost 3x less). Guess which one. (same channel, same audience, and roughly the same duration: 13mn vs 12mn & only 4 months between em)

Video 1 beats video 2 in EVERY. SINGLE. ASPECT. (even the retention time graph) And yet (you guessed the plot twist) video 2 is the one with 1.4M views.

The lesson here: No matter how many numbers you will put at work, it will always be easier to understand people rather than numbers.

Focus on providing value to your audience, and you will succeed. Almost everything else is a waste of time. Here is a starting point: twitter.com/wono_strategy/status/1569298001943748608

If this helped you, subscribe 👉 @wono_strategy, there's more to come. 🙂