Today I’m going to be answering a simple question. Do ads help with watch time for the YouTube requirement for a 1000 hours?

If you don’t know you can promote your YouTube videos as ads to help boost your views and (hopefully) help with getting more engagement.

With that being said, will that help you with getting watch time?

If you don’t feel like reading, you can watch this video below.

Yes and No

So the answer is directly no. When somebody clicks on your ad and watches the video, you’re not getting any watch time out of that.

The way you can get watch time with ads is indirectly and you get them between two different ways: one with earned views and then the other with the SEO score.

I’m gonna start with earn views first. Google calls it earned engagement. You have earned likes earned views, and earned subscribers.

What is earned engagement?

When somebody clicks on your ad and they do something else on your channel that’s not on the advertised video within 7 days.

Example – Someone watches your ad then watches a different video of yours. That’s an earned view.

When someone leaves your ad and goes to watch another video on your channel, that watch time counts towards YouTube’s requirement.

A good strategy for that is making a playlist and having part one as the ad. When somebody finishes part one they probably want to go see part two so right after.

Part two and so on is an earned view and that watch time counts towards YouTube’s requirement.

It’s always a good idea to try to optimize keeping people on your work but with ads it also gives like a little more emphasis to try to keep a person’s attention to your work and not try to go to somebody else.

Increasing your SEO score

Before, ads could help the SEO score with getting more views for your channel but YouTube has changed so I cannot say it will boost up your SEO score anymore.

Also, ads in general have very low watch retention. You could see an ad’s watch time average be less than 20 seconds. It is recommended to make a duplicate video of the video you want to make an ad, set it as private, and use the private video for promotion.

Your video’s SEO score is based off things like views, engagement and watch time. As you get more views you can really see that you start to get ranked with the SEO score.

It will be a rare to see a video get a boost this way but if you’re not getting views anyway, you might want to give it a shot.