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Glossary
Watch time
The total time viewers spent watching your videos. YouTube uses it to rank videos and to decide Partner Program eligibility.
Watch time adds up every minute people watched. For the Partner Program, the path through long videos asks for 4,000 valid public watch hours in the last 12 months; time watched in the Shorts feed does not count toward those hours.
Longer is not automatically better: a video people watch to the end usually helps more than a long one they leave early.
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