The YouTube Formula

16Engaging Viewers' Attention So They Watch More

You have created an awesome title and thumbnail and gotten the viewer to click, made good content, gotten feedback, and you know where your viewers are coming from … so, what's next? Next, you focus on one thing: retention, retention, retention. Retention simply means that if someone clicks on your video, you have to keep them watching in order for your content to perform its best.

There is an idea that continues to circulate that the human attention span has dipped below that of goldfish. The number put on it is eight seconds. This theory came from a study done in 2015, but a quick fact check leaves you wondering: Who comes up with this stuff anyway? A BBC article titled “Busting the attention span myth,” written by Simon Maybin, exposes all the holes in the goldfish theory. It quotes Dr. Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at Open University, who thinks the idea of an “average attention span” is pretty meaningless, because attention is task‐dependent. She said, “How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much about what the individual brings to that situation.”

Whether human attention spans are getting shorter, there is one thing we probably all agree on: we live in a world full of distractions. I woke up to 66 new text messages, 11 Slack messages, 4 voicemails, 128 Facebook notifications, and emails in the thousands. The cell phone has changed the way we manage the world, in both good ways and bad. We have ...