One of the primary requirements you need to fulfill in order to become eligible for monetizing your YouTube channel is that you must have at least 4,000 hours of watch time within a year. Read detailed eligibility criterial here.
4,000 hours of watch time equal to 240,000 minutes. This requirement may seem difficult to reach for new content creators. But it is easy to achieve providing you consistently produce quality videos for your channel.
How Long Does It Take to Reach 4k Hours?
First, it is important for you to know your present position. Go to analytics section in youtube. There it dislays the watch time of your channel as well as your individual videos in minutes rather than hours. Considering the 4,000 watch hours requirement, this might make it a bit confusing if you are doing well.
As mentioned above, 4.000 hours of watch time equal to 240.000 minutes. This is what you want to reach within a year. To determine how long it can take to reach this requirement, consider this example: you make 10-minute videos on your channel and all of those videos get 50% watch time on average. This means you are getting 5 minutes of average watch time per video. Now divide the total watch minutes requirement i.e. 240,000 by your average per video watch time i.e. 5 and you will get the number of views required for your channel to accumulate in order to reach the 4000 hours watch time. The result is 48,000 views.
To break it down further, if you upload a hundred videos then you will need an average of 480 views per video. This calculation makes it clear that it is possible to reach YouTube’s watch time requirement fairly quickly.
Another simple way to calculate is to divide the total watch minutes requirement by the number of months within a year, i.e. 240,000/12. This equals 20,000 minutes. So, you need 20,000 minutes of watch time per month in order to reach the 4,000 hours watch time in a year. Obviously, the time it takes to fulfill this requirement is going to vary from one YouTube channel to another.
Have you already reached 4000 watch hours and want to grow beyond and fast? If yes then check out our blog post on How Long Does It Take to Reach 4000 Hours? However if you are still far from there, here are a few quick tips to help you speed up your journey.
How to Reach 4,000 Watch Hours Quickly?
Getting 4,000 hours or 240,000 minutes watch time on your channel is not as difficult as you probably think. Following are some tips that will help:
- Increase Upload Frequency: By increasing the number of videos that you upload each week, you will increase your chances of accumulating more watch time.
- Create Interesting Thumbnails: Make sure that your video thumbnails are attractive and interesting as they will improve the amount of traffic you get on your channel.
- Create Longer Videos: If you can keep your audience engaged throughout your video, you will certainly accumulate more watch time. Apart from creating longer videos, reminding people in the video to watch it all the way through is also a good p practice.
- Use Playlists: If you link your video to another video in a playlist, you can increase the watch time of your first video. So, be sure to take advantage of this feature.
Reaching 4000 watch hours may seem scary to a new YouTube content creator, but it’s actually easy to reach. All you need to do is create quality content consistently and follow the above-listed guidelines. Soon, you will be on your way to monetizing your channel!