I did a mistake which result into loosing YouTube watch hours and put my channel overall ranking below par. If you also have similar issue, give yourself a few minutes and watch this video carefully and save yourself from disaster.
Recently, I noticed my YouTube watch hours are decreasing in my Channel. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed this if my channel was already monetized with YouTube advertising partner program. Last time I checked within my YouTube creator studio, I had around 3 thousand eight hindered watch hours listed in channel’s monetization page. Since then, I published couple of more videos and some of them got decent views. Today, when I checked my YouTube monetization page again to see how far my channel is to reach the 4 thousand hours monetization threshold. I was shocked, instate of going close to the threshold, the YouTube monetization page shows, it is going on reverse way, from 3800+ hours my channel now standing on 3500+ hours, and this is happening while I have approx. 10 hrs. of watch time every day from my videos. Now, let’s find out what exactly cause that.
Within YouTube analytics page, I would like to show some of the videos that I am getting the watch hours from. This particular video, I published on 19th, March, a few days ago and it got decent views and watch hours. The next video was published also not so long ago which got also decent views and watch hours. Most important part is all of these videos are getting the traffic from YouTube search.
Let’s check another video with 11K+ views, which have 139 comments, 460 likes and 49 dislike. Fair enough, let’s check the analytic insights. The insights suggest, 79% of traffic is from YouTube search and 11 % of traffic is from YouTube suggested and 5% is from browse features. If I count all of this which gives around 95% of traffic come from YouTube itself, yet my watch hours are constantly decreasing!

If you are wondering how I got the rest of the YouTube watch hours, I can show you, I used to have some entertainment, live streaming as such Live Santa Tracker and New Year Countdown something like that.

While making this video, I also did some research, I knew that removing a video or making it private will reduce the YouTube watch hours but I didn’t know that trimming also decreases the watch hours. Yes, you heard it correct, if you trim your YouTube video, your YouTube watch hours will reduce, how much reduce? It depends on where do you trim, in my case, most of my video, I trim was at the beginning of the video.

Actually, I want to make my videos short and catchy so I removed many of my videos first few seconds to minutes. In that case, I am actually removing my first 100% retention, which is really bad for my YouTube channels over all ranking.

Now most of my videos have low retention because of the first 100% retention part is removed. Look at this video, this particular video with 1.1K views starting retention is 84%.. I removed 1minutes and 50 seconds of first part of video. Because I removed the good user retention part of the video I also make this video overall retention below average. Uffffffff. OMG, what have I done.

The sad part is, If I reupload the same video, my subscriber will probably get tired of the same content again and again. If I wait, YouTube will probably never going to recommend my video to the others because of the videos below par retention.
Average
My lost is gone, now there is no such function as undo in YouTube studio, I make this video just to save others like me to save from the disaster.

if you are about to trim your video or if you have any plan to trim in day to come, please consider where to trim and how to trim. This could result many possible ways. My advice for you, if you can keep the first few minutes of video, let it be.

That’s it for this video, if are still watching this video, please subscriber to my channel and let’s grow together. Learning and helping each other’s. Until next video take care and see you.