Average view duration is total watch time divided by total views.
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Divide total watch time by total views. A video with 50,000 total minutes watched across 10,000 views has an average view duration of 5 minutes per view. If the video itself runs 8 minutes long, that means viewers are watching about 62.5% of it on average before clicking away, a number YouTube Studio reports directly as average percentage viewed.
Average view duration is a per-video average, so it can be pulled up by a small group of viewers who watch the entire video on loop just as easily as it can be pulled down by many viewers who click away in the first few seconds. Reading it alongside the audience retention graph in YouTube Studio shows exactly where in the video people are actually dropping off.
Total accumulated watch time is also a gatekeeping metric for monetization, separate from the per-video average this calculator produces. YouTube's standard Partner Program tier requires 1,000 subscribers and either 4,000 public watch hours in the past 12 months or 10 million public Shorts views in the past 90 days. An earlier, expanded-monetization tier unlocks at 500 subscribers and 3,000 watch hours, or 3 million Shorts views in 90 days, though that tier only enables channel memberships and fan-funding features, not ad revenue.
YouTube tracks long-form watch hours and Shorts views as two separate paths to the same threshold, rather than blending them together, so a channel needs to clear one path or the other on its own.
Getting found is still the first step before anyone watches a second of video. See Rankite's AI search optimization and SEO content optimization.
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