YouTube audience retention

Audience retention is really important.

Good retention means that viewers ether watch your video completely or are sticking with your video almost until the end.

Bad retention means that viewers are instantly leaving your video.

Good retention leads to many minutes watched and also good view duration per video. Imagine that your average view duration is 10 minutes. Then for 1000 views you will get 10000 minutes watched!

It is not a secret, that for a YouTube algorithm, minutes watched are much more important than number of views.

Audience retention also signifies "stickiness" and high engagement rate from your viewership. It can improve other metrics such as subscribers per view, number of monetized playbacks and all other good stuff.

What is a good audience retention on YouTube?

On average audience retention on YouTube is around 50-60%. It means, that the average viewer will watch 50-60% of your video.

However, according to other sources it can be as low as 30%.

Only 35% of all viewers stick to more than 50% of the videos.

• 10% have 51-60% retention on YouTube
• ~15% have 60-70%
• 10% have 71-80%

So, anything above 50% is a good retention for YouTube videos.