Will “Skipping to the Best Part” Decrease Watch Time? ⎸ Most Replayed Explained

What is the “Most Replayed” feature?

The new feature is called Popular Segments, and it’s a graph that lets you see which parts of the video are most interesting.

This allows you to navigate to highlights within a video. The graph’s peaks show which parts of the videos have been the most replayed. You might know this feature from other websites. The chart appears when a user starts seeking a video using the red progress bar at the bottom of a video.

Why I don’t see the “Most Replayed” graph?

YouTube is rolling out this feature to all Android and iOS devices and web browsers. If you’re currently not seeing the feature, you should be very soon. YouTube started experimenting with Popular Segments last year, and only Premium members could access it. But according to YouTube, 85% of users like it, and they are now rolling it out to everyone.

Will “Most Replayed” affect watch time?

Of course, the big question for YouTubers is will it affect watch times? Could this negatively impact the view duration of specific viewers when they start skipping through videos, especially for certain types of videos? When publishing this new feature, YouTube also shared some insights from the experiments.

Apparently, there is no significant impact on the watch time and no impact on different content types. And even if this might be counterintuitive at first, it makes sense if you think about it. And we would even argue that this could help some bad tutorial videos that take forever to get to the point.

While in the past, viewers would have just left these videos, now they can skip to the important part and watch at least some parts of the video.

Skipping through YouTube tutorials could also help judge the quality of the video and how helpful it is. Since dislike buttons have been hidden, this is sometimes hard to tell.

Can I disable the “Most Replayed” feature?

For now there’s no way to stop this feature from showing on your videos.

Should I change the content strategy?

This feature is intended to improve the viewer experience no matter what you do in your video. For content creators, nothing has changed. Of course, like before, you should still work on your viewer retentions and get your viewers to stay on your videos as long as possible.

I hope this article was helpful 🙂 Learn more about YouTube video marketing at tubics.com/blog!