YouTube Click-Through Tool 

challenge:

Design a mechanism within digital programming to organically grow the YouTube audience.

Solution:

At Discovery, as with most media companies, performance is measured on viewers. As YouTube built out dashboards and analytics tools, we, as digital programmers, could start accurately measuring these views and actually pinpoint to the second where people would stop watching our videos. The common practice at the time was to have an end slate on all your videos and give viewers a big box to click so they could subscribe to your channel as well as three options for other videos they could watch next. These are called “click-throughs” and are a valuable way to improve overall channel watch time. If you were lucky, the viewer would click the annotation on the screen and watch the next video. But this, according to the analytics, only happened about 1 to 3 percent of the time.

Looking back at earlier experiments, we found that if we directly asked the audience at any point in the video to do only one action (subscribe to the channel, comment on the video, etc.), they actually would follow through at a surprisingly high rate.
 

We also looked at old media techniques for getting audiences to continue watching (or listening) to their programming. Leading out shows with a tease to the next show was proven to get people to stay tuned.

So we combined the old media techniques with a call to the audience for just one action at the end of our videos. We designed end slates with simple, big, easy to understand instructions. And we developed an editorial process so the episodes being teased were similar in tone to the episode just watched.

results:

Click-through rates jumped from an average of 2 percent to an average of about 10 percent. And, if we were using this tool properly, the audience was able to continue discovering content they liked. This technique allowed us to not only grow a single channel, but also launch new shows, porting over existing audiences. My final year at Discover, in part with this click-through tool, we had over one billion views across all our programming.