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My watch time shot up 40% after I stopped editing out my mistakes, and I feel weird about it
About two months ago I looked at my analytics and saw that my average view time on videos was sitting at 1 minute 48 seconds, which was pretty bad for videos that were around 10 minutes long. I had been editing in this really tight, scripted way where I cut out every pause, every stumble, every time I went back and said a sentence over again. Then one night I was tired and just uploaded a raw take where I left in a part where I forgot what I was saying and literally said out loud, hey wait, let me check my notes real quick. That video got the best watch time of anything I had posted in six months, sitting at 2 minutes 32 seconds average. So I tested it for a few more uploads, leaving in small mistakes and dead air, and the number kept going up. Now I am sitting at 2 minutes 40 average and I genuinely dont know how to feel about it, because part of me thinks it looks unprofessional. My editing friends in a Discord server are split on it, some say its lazy and some say it makes you more real. Has anyone else noticed their raw, unedited stuff outperforming the polished stuff, and did you end up keeping it that way or going back?
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the_avery18d ago
Polish is overrated, keep the mess.
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the_nina18d ago
That "hey wait, let me check my notes" moment is exactly the kind of thing that keeps people watching, because it feels like a real person instead of a script. I stopped cutting every stumble a while back and my watch time stayed up, so I just kept doing it.
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