If you want to become a YouTuber, then making videos and uploading on your channel is very easy; but understanding the analytics and data insights of your YouTube channel requires a basic understanding of the important terminologies that you may come across in your content creation journey.

And today, we’ll discuss the same making you aware of the basic concepts you need to know to become a successful YouTuber.

Important Terminologies on YouTube

As you create your channel, YouTube provides creators with a channel dashboard to manage them. You can upload videos from the Studio, create community posts, edit channel and video information, view analytics and performance of your channel and do a lot of creative things.

Some of the most common terms you’ll notice in the channel dashboard are impression, click-through-rate, copyright strikes, real-time views, audience retention, watch time, made for kids, and others. We’ll now discuss these important terminologies one by one in detail.

Impressions

Impression tells the reach of your videos, exactly how many people come across your videos. Impressions are counted if the thumbnail is shown for more than 1 second and at least 50% of the thumbnail is visible on the screen like in the YouTube homepage, subscription feed, YouTube search, recommendations, and playlists.

Click-through-Rate (CTR)

As the name suggests, CTR tells how many people clicked on something. Impressions-CTR refers to how often viewers watched a video after seeing a thumbnail. Apart from this, CTR can also be seen in Google AdSense where it tells how many people clicked on the advertisements shown to them.

Watch Time

Watch time refers to the total time viewers spend watching your videos. For example, you created a video of 5 minutes and a thousand people watched that video completely then your video got 5000 minutes of watch time.

Average View Duration

It tells the estimated average minutes watched per view for the selected video and date range. Average view duration can be a great metric to know exactly to what length people watch your videos, and you can change video time limits as per the data insights.

RPM (Revenue Per Mile)

RPM is a metric that represents how much money you’ve earned per 1,000 video views. RPM is based on several revenue sources including Ads, Channel memberships, YouTube Premium revenue, Super Chat, and Super Stickers.

CPM (Cost Per Mile)

CPM is a metric that represents how much money advertisers are spending to show ads on YouTube. It is the cost an advertiser pays for 1,000 ad impressions, and an ad impression is counted anytime an ad is displayed. And the cost an advertiser pays for 1,000 video playbacks where an ad is displayed is known as playback-based CPM.

Views from External Sources

Traffic from websites and apps that have your YouTube video embedded or linked to is considered views from external sources.

Browse Features

Views from browse features refer to traffic from the Home, subscriptions, Watch Later, Trending/Explore, and other browsing features on YouTube.

Suggested Videos

Whenever you watch videos on YouTube, you might have seen many videos that are suggested to you. And the traffic from suggestions that appear next to or after other videos, and from links in video descriptions is known as traffic from suggested videos.

Made for Kids

Keeping the safety of children, YouTube has launched an option where you can specify your videos as ‘made for kids’ content. And you can set your videos as ‘made for kids’ if your main target audience is children, and YouTube will disable some features on your videos in order to keep children safe on its platform.

Community Guidelines

YouTube has set a few guidelines that every content creator needs to follow while making videos for their YouTube channels. These policies apply to all types of content on YouTube, including videos, comments, links, and thumbnails.

And if anyone violates these guidelines, YouTube penalizes their channels giving them a strike, and when a channel receives three strikes in the same 90-day time period then that channel gets permanently removed from YouTube.

Copyright

If a person creates an original work, then they automatically own the copyright to that work. As the copyright owner, they have the exclusive right to use the work. Most of the time, only the copyright owner can say whether someone else has permission to use the work or not.

Any music, song, photo, design, video footage, and other creative works come under copyright and the owner of them has the exclusive rights. If the owner doesn’t want that work to be used by any other person, then they can sue for any use without their permission.

Copyright Strike

If you use any copyrighted material in your videos, you can get a copyright strike and it’s the same as that of the community guidelines strike. A copyright owner can submit a complete and valid legal takedown request for using their copyright-protected content and when YouTube get this type of formal notification, it takes down your video to comply with copyright law.

The first time you get a strike, it’s a warning. Copyright strikes may affect your ability to monetize. In addition, if your active live stream is removed for copyright, your access to live streaming will be restricted for 7 days. And if you get 3 strikes in the same 90-day period, then your channel can be removed permanently from YouTube.

Copyright Claim

It is also known as Content ID claim. If you upload a video that contains copyright-protected content, your video could get a Content ID claim. These claims are automatically generated when an uploaded video matches another video (or part of another video) in YouTube’s Content ID system.

Content ID is a fully-automated digital rights management tool on the YouTube platform that scans videos and notifies the rights holder if their video clips, images, or audio have been used without express permission.

Limited ads

If you are a part of the YouTube Partner Program that means your channel is monetized, then some of your videos might get the dollar sign ‘yellow’ or you’ll see ‘limited or no ads’.

This icon means that you’ve turned on monetization for a video, but YouTube’s automated systems or policy specialists believe that video does not meet its advertiser-friendly content guidelines. You may earn less revenue on this content (because fewer ads are likely to appear) compared to content that’s suitable for all advertisers.

Unlisted Video

When you upload a video on your YouTube channel, you’ll get the option to make your video Public, Private, Unlisted, or Scheduled in the visibility section. If you set your video to ‘Public’ that means anyone on YouTube can see your video. They’re posted on your channel when you upload them and show up in search results and related video lists.

Private videos and playlists can only be seen by you and whomever you choose. And, unlisted videos and playlists can be seen and shared by anyone with the link to that video.

Realtime Views

In the Analytics section in YouTube Studio, you’ll get to see real-time views. It usually tells the number of views you’re getting in the last 48 hours and the last 60 minutes, you can see this data selecting any of these. Real-time views tell you how your channel is performing currently and which videos are getting more views.

Also Read: YouTube Analytics Explained for Beginners