The 2 metrics that matter for podcast clips on YouTube Shorts

When I started distributing podcasts clips, I would try different things to see what generates more views.

Different hooks, video lengths, titles, descriptions… But I realised that every new clip posted was just another gamble.

So I stopped putting all my focus on views. Simply because there’s plenty lot of factors that makes short videos blow up or flop.

So I started obsessing with only a couple of metrics that seem to have a direct impact on views. Instead on focusing on each video, I focused on trends and what seems to usually happen.

If I improve these few metrics, views counts will follow.

And today these are the only 2 metrics I observe for podcast clips on youtube shorts today.

Average view duration

I went on my client’s YouTube studio then sorted the short videos by view count.

None of these videos reached the thousand of views. However for the best-performing quarter of those, most have an average view duration of 15 seconds or more.

The more I go down in the table sorted by views count, the less I see videos hitting 15 seconds on average view duration.

So when podcast clips hit thousands or millions of view, most likely viewers watch these videos for almost of minute (because YouTube Shorts were capped to 60 seconds).

But when these clips get so many views, most of them must have another metric that correlate.

Viewed vs swiped away

In this podcast episode from Jay Clouse with Jenny Hoyos the YouTube Shorts expert, she shares that she gets 85% on this metric on average.

So I wasn’t surprised that none of my client’s clips had reached such a number.

Only a couple of them have 60% or more. But they didn’t get many views because the average view duration remained low.

This shows again the importance of a good hook which I talk more about in the second part of this article.

Once I’ll increase both viewed vs swiped away and average view duration, views count will increase significantly.

If you need to go deeper on this topic, I highly recommend reading the following thread from Paddy Galloway.

When I’ll have hundreds of clips and millions of views in the bank, I’ll give you an update on these metrics.

That’s it for me today.
Loïc.