What is 4000 Hours of Watch Time on YouTube?

If you have an active YouTube channel, you might be interested in monetizing the channel using Google Adsense. However, YouTube has made it much stricter recently for people to monetize their channel. They have set the requirements for the channel to have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within 12 months.

So, if your channel has more than 1,000 subscribers, you still need the 4,000 hours of watch time within 12 months. This is the requirement to be eligible for the YouTube monetization. 4,000 hours of watch time equal to 240,000 minutes a year. If you consistently produce quality videos for your channel, eventually you will be able to reach that requirement.

HOW TO CHECK IF YOU HAVE REACHED 4,000 HOURS WATCH TIME ON YOUTUBE

Step 1

Go to your YouTube channel, click at “YouTube Studio.”

Step 2

In your YouTube channel studio, go to “Analytics.”

Step 3

In your channel analytics, click here to set the analytics duration

Step 4

In the menu shown, click the “Last 365 days.”

Step 5

Look at the figure shown in watch time. The number shown is in watch time minutes for the last 365 days.

For you channel to qualify for monetization, the figure here should at least shows 240 K for the last 365 days or 12 months.

HOW TO GET 4,000 HOURS OF WATCH TIME

• PRODUCE CONSISTENT CONTENT WITH GOOD STORY LINE

If you do the math, you have to produce contents that need to garner 20,000 minutes of watch time every month. The only way you can achieve that is by creating many videos in a month. But not just any videos, the videos must be good enough for people to watch it for a significant number of time. Therefore, even though not all of your video can get good enough traction, a combination of your videos can. Thus, one of the critical element to getting to the threshold is by producing consistent video content each month.

• TRACK THE CHANNEL ANALYTICS AND PRODUCE CONTENT THAT IS WORKING

Once you have produced consistent quality videos over time, the next thing you should do is to monitor the data analytics of your channel. Try to figure out what is working and produce a similar video to that topic. Try to find footage that has a long duration of watch time and try to create the same video content but with different angle or perspectives.

• PROMOTE YOUR VIDEO IN OTHER PLATFORMS

Publishing your video on YouTube and promoting it there is still not enough. You need to also promote it to your other social media platforms such as your Facebook page or Twitter so that you can attract more traffic to the channel.

So, there you have it. A simple explanation of what is 4,000 hours of watch time and how you can quickly check if you have achieved that threshold requirement for your channel. Feel free to leave us a comment below on how fast you manage to get to your 4,000 hours of watch time and 1,000 subscribers for your channel.

Please read also our previous article on how to optimize your YouTube video.