More Than Just Views

Are views the only thing that matter on YouTube? No, there are several other metrics you can and should take into account when trying to assess the success or failure of a video.

Views

The total number of views is the kingpin of all the metrics. If people aren’t watching your video nothing else matters. That being said, views should be your primary but not your only goal.

Ratings

You should also look at how many times your video has been rated. Rating your video shows interaction from the viewer. It’s also important to look at what the ratings are, not just if you are being rated. On YouTube rating a video means “liking” or “disliking” the video. If you create a video that gets a lot of views but everyone dislikes it, are you really accomplishing what you want? Videos sometimes become popular on YouTube simply because people like to mock them. The most viewed video on YouTube is a Justin Bieber song. However, that video has 1.6 million dislikes, compared to 800 thousand likes. Depending on what you trying to accomplish that high of a dislike ratio could be a problem. Another example of this is a song called Friday by Rebecca Black. Friday got over 130 million views, however, 87% of the ratings were dislikes, for a total of 3.1 million dislikes.

Comments

Comments on your video can also be useful. You can often get an idea of what viewers liked or didn’t like about your video from the comments. Commenting also shows that viewers are interacting with your video on a deeper level. They care enough about it to write something.

Video Responses

It’s common practice on YouTube to make video responses to other videos. Generating video responses indicates even more interaction with your video than comments. However, video responses can be a double edged sword. In our example early of Rebecca Black’s video hundreds of video responses were made; however, no matter how hard we look, we cannot find a single positive one. What you want are video responses that affirm or positively spin off your video.

Number of Links

The last metric is how many third party sites link to your YouTube video or embed the video in their site. A high number a links indicates that your video is being shared. Obviously the more your video is shared the better. The more it’s shared the more people see it and, hopefully, that equals more views and a more effective ad campaign.

Remember to keep in mind all of the factors that contribute to a successful YouTube video, not just views.

Here is the Justin Bieber video that is currently the most viewed YouTube video of all time and the second most disliked video of all time. Unfortunately we can't show you the Rebecca Black video because it's been removed from YouTube do to copyright issues.