After numerous years of monitoring your usage stats, YouTube has decided to give some of this information back to users. YouTube has introduced a new feature called ‘Watch Time Tracking’ that gives users details about how much time they are spending on the app.
This feature which is currently only available to Android users gives users access to information such as their daily and weekly average time spent on the app. Users can now utilize some basic calculations and gauge how much time they spend on YouTube in a month and plan accordingly. This feature will allow users to balance their lives by letting them evaluate and plan to engage in other constructive activities away from YouTube.
As usual, this feature can only be accessed after a user updates to the latest version of the app on the Play Store or App Store.
How to use it
After updating, visit your YouTube ‘Profile’ section and click ‘Time watched’ on the list of items displayed. This should open to a simple dashboard displaying your usage stats. If you have been using the app and have had your account running for quite some time, all your details will be estimated and displayed for you.
See also: How to make money online through YouTube
In addition to this feature, YouTube has also added a section that allows you to manage your time with elements such as; the ability to turn on a reminder that instructs you when to take a break from the app, the ability to turn on and off auto play, the ability to schedule a digest that gives you all your notifications at once, and lots more.
YouTube has also set 1 hour and 15 minutes as the default appropriate time for a single YouTube session after which a user should take a rest from the app. Users can go ahead and edit this time to something they consider more appropriate.
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For YouTube users accessing through the web, this feature has still not yet been added.
YouTube follows other social media apps like Facebook that also added dashboards to enable their users to monitor their usage and evaluate accordingly.
However, one of the goals for app developers is to have high levels of user engagement and yet these dashboards seem to be trying to reduce that. Reminding a user to take a break after every 1 hour and 15 minutes is like sending them to use other apps. The upside to such features is that users have the ability to turn on and off the features or even choose to simply ignore them.
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