YouTube will assume your video is a satisfactory answer to the viewer’s question.īut say someone does that search but when they play your video, they discover the audio is too quiet. If people search for, “ how to make candles“, and they watch all your video about making candles, that sends a powerful message. It is used to help answer whether a video answers the viewer’s search question. One of the most important metrics for YouTube is Watch Time. Ultimately, that could harm your search ranking if YouTube sees viewers bouncing away from your video. Whether the audio is too loud or too quiet, the result is that you are not delivering a good viewer experience. The viewer must turn up the volume knob, which can be annoying. The result is your video may seem quiet compared to the rest in a playlist. If your audio was too quiet for YouTube’s loudness standard, YouTube does absolutely nothing to make it sound as loud as other videos that have been normalized to the YouTube loudness standard. Meanwhile, other videos with a wider dynamic will sound just as loud and sound better.
By the time YouTube has normalized the loudness, your audio not only is quieter, but it also has less dynamic range.
If you heavily compress the dynamic range of your audio to make it sound loud. So, what’s the big deal about loudness on YouTube? Why does YouTube Content loudness matter? If your audio is quieter than the ideal YouTube content loudness, YouTube does not make your audio louder. If your audio is too loud, YouTube will bring it down. So, what happens when YouTube loudness normalization is applied to your audio. However, the roll-out apparently started in December 2015. If you regularly upload videos, you can easily check when YouTube audio normalization was applied to your account. This is what’s called Replay Volume Normalization or Y ouTube audio normalization.Ĭhecking my video uploads, I discovered the YouTube loudness standard started to be applied to my content sometime between 21st and 27th August 2016. To put it another way, if your video does not conform to the YouTube loudness standards, they will adjust it for you. Streaming services, including YouTube, are adjusting the loudness of uploaded content.