How To Reach 4000 Watch Hours On YouTube

The question of how to reach 4000 watch hours on YouTube is not new to most YouTubers. This is because it serves as one of the most important metrics YouTube uses in granting access to its YPP. Content creators on YouTube are always looking forward to attaining this milestone in their YouTube careers.

After the acquisition of YouTube by Google in October 2006, the platform has since evolved and grown. From a relatively small-scale regular video streaming platform, it became a large service that now influences popular culture, internet trends, and world ideas. As of 2020, YouTube’s revenue topped over $19.8 billion.

In this article, I am going to shed light on how to reach 4000 watch hours on YouTube. These procedures are not a one-stop-fits-all approach and results would vary from YouTuber to YouTuber.

YOUTUBE PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM

The YouTube Partner Program (YPP) gives content creators and YouTubers greater access to YouTube resources and features like direct access to the YouTube Creator Support team. It also enables revenue generation from ads being displayed on your content.

Requirements to join YPP:

• Follow all the YouTube monetization policies.
• YouTube monetization policies allow creators to monetize their channels and make money from them. As a content creator, you must adhere strictly to these policies to enable you to join the program.
• Creators must live in a country/region where the YouTube Partner Program is available.
• Your channel must have more than 4,000 valid public watch hours in the last 12 months.
• Creators must have a minimum of 1,000 subscribers or more.
• Have a linked Ad Sense account.

How to Reach 4000 Watch Hours on YouTube

If you ever plan on getting to 4000 watch hours on YouTube, first you need to understand what it means, how it works, and how it is calculated. Also, you need to understand what counts as watch-time on YouTube. Here are some tips on how to reach 4000 watch hours on YouTube:

Optimize Your YouTube Contents

When you’re starting a new YouTube channel, the odds are always stacked against you. YouTube will never recommend your videos to new people and your channel will not grow organically, because YouTube doesn’t know much about you, your channel, the content you create, and who would be interested in viewing your channel. Thankfully, content creators can get around this by optimizing their videos for YouTube search.

This means optimizing both channel and content is an important action on how to reach 4000 watch hours on YouTube. First, you have to know your niche, then find video topics that many people are searching for in your niche area on YouTube, with very few competing video content in the search results. Once you can identify a high search volume, low competition keyword, create targeted information-rich video content for this topic. You can then optimize your video title, description, and keywords for YouTube SEO.

YouTube SEO is one of the most powerful tools you can use to optimize your YouTube video content. If there is limited video content about a specific topic including yours, then your video will show up on the first page of YouTube’s search results for your targeted keyword.

Employ Versatility

Content creators can mix up the category of content on their channel to help answer their question on how to reach 4000 watch hours on YouTube. Suppose you have a fashion-related channel, it doesn’t mean you have to make only fashion-related videos. You can other forms of video content to increase your viewing hours.

You can make comedy videos, Pranks, Reaction videos, Roasting, or whatever video form you can create. YouTube doesn’t restrict its content creators to make videos in a particular category. It does not violate the YouTube guideline.

For content creators, it’s quite easy to Gain watch time on comedy videos, Pranks, or anything in the entertainment category. Whenever you research on YouTube you will find that funny/Entertainment category videos get more views than the other category.

You can try making 5 videos or more in these categories until you reach the 4000 hours watch time mark, you can make those contents alongside your original category on what you like or what you were making. In the same way, you will also get more than 1000 subscribers and more watch time.

ADD VIDEO CARDS TO YOUR VIDEOS

To get more watch time and reach the 4000 hours mark to enable monetization, you also have to get more people to watch more of your videos which means more subscribers. One of the easiest and quickest ways is by recommending someone on one of your related videos via video cards.

Those are the little info icons that appear in the top right corner of video content on YouTube. You can recommend up to 5 or more videos per video and this strategy is highly recommended and incorporating this for all of your videos will increase watch time. If you are a new content creator, you might not have enough video content to recommend. But don’t stress. You can always go back and add cards later, once you have enough content material.

RECOMMEND VIDEOS IN YOUR VIDEO DESCRIPTION AND COMMENTS

Another magnificent way to promote your videos to new viewers is by sharing links to some of your videos and playlists in the description of your videos. For content videos, you should frequently review your top-performing videos in terms of watch time, views, and engagement. Then can copy all video links in a text file and add the video title in front or above each link.

Next, you can add links to your website, social media accounts, and products and then use TubeBuddy to replace the description in all of your content videos with the click of a button. Sometimes, especially, if you want to recommend very specific videos, you can follow a slightly different approach. Instead of sharing the video URL that you mentioned in your video in the description, you can share them in a comment and then pin the comment to the top.

Use YouTube Live

We talked about the importance of optimizing videos before. With optimized videos, you need a much smaller number of viewers to get to the same number of watch hours.

Since you don’t have the 400 hours watch the time it means you don’t have a lot of subscribers yet, that’s generally a good thing. We recommend recording longer videos of 10-15 minutes. But if you really want to increase your watch time, you’ll need significantly longer videos.

Now, unless you have the talent and time to produce hour-long videos on a weekly basis without burning out, and generally this is too long as viewers at times might get bored unless it’s an academic content that they need to learn from there is a much easier way to get your watch time up to speed.

We highly recommend having a regular schedule, for example, specific days of the week and a scheduled time, so your audience is able to form a habit of attending your live streams.

Collaborating with other content creators 

This is a very important thing to do, but this may not be possible for Every Content Creator or YouTuber.

If you know Any Creator or YouTuber who has a decent number of the subscriber and significant amount of watch time with any number more than 10k, 100k subscribers. Then you can reach out to them a request for collaboration or you can ask them to post your video link to their community tab to boost your view time.

This will really help you to get 4000hrs Watch Time and 1000 or more Subscribers.

host ONLINE COURSE

As a content creator, you can create an online course and teach it on your YouTube channel. This can help you achieve your aim of reaching 4000 watch hours quickly as it guarantees the audience will watch your content.

To do this your course has to be informative, educative, and entertaining at the same time. But you can keep it super simple. Just create a hidden page on your website and add all course videos as a series playlist on YouTube.

People love structure and are more willing to consume larger amounts of content if it’s presented and structured the right way this is where the power of a series playlist comes to.

Utilize Playlist

Video playlist is one of the ways YouTubers can work around the challenge of how to get 4000 watch hours on YouTube. Playlists are a way of gently urging viewers to further watch your contents.

It helps create more of a gradual viewing experience which has the potential of increasing a channel’s Watch Time on YouTube. Content creators can design several video playlists to encapsulate all their videos. The simple trick is to ensure that the playlist is organized in sequences and is of relevance to each other.

By leveraging the effectiveness of Playlists, channels can gain viewership by attracting more audiences to their content in a viewing session. This helps improve channel visibility and increases YouTube Watch Time. Here are ways to leverage the playlist:

• The playlist can be leveraged in a normal or series manner. With a “normal” or no playlist at all, there is no way of knowing if YouTube would suggest the concluding part as the next recommended video. The series playlists guaranties that your contents are played one after the other. So long they are serialized in a playlist. YouTube will automatically play your videos and you get to achieve your aim of 4000 watch hours.
• You can also share your playlist instead of individual video links. To do this, find the playlist containing the video you wish to share. Select the video you want to share and copy the long convoluted URL. You can then start to share this link and watch your watch hour increase.

Promote Your Videos on Social Media

One effective means on how to get 4000 watch hours on YouTube is to actively promote your content on other social media. Active promotion helps you drive traffic to your content from sources other than the YouTube platform.

Asides from increasing your watch hours tremendously, actively promoting your content have other benefits:

• You bring fresh users to the YouTube platform. This allows YouTube to show them ads which translates into extra revenue for YouTube. Result? YouTube will reward you with organic impressions.
• You know your audience best. By recommending your videos to people you know are interested in the content, you allow YouTube to create lookalike audiences. It works similar to Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought these” feature. Once YouTube is able to see patterns among viewers, it will be able to make educated guesses what other YouTube videos and creators you might be interested in.
• You make your own luck. Or in this case your own watch time. The more that you promote your own videos, the quicker you’ll get to 4,000 hours of watch time.

Conclusion 

There are no two ways about how to reach 4000 watch hours on YouTube except by hard work. All the tips mentioned here will require content creators to spend ample time working out strategies best suited to them. A combination of a few might prove the difference to your YouTube business.