EVIDENCE 014
The audience was there. YouTube kept looking elsewhere.
Several Western European countries watched substantially longer — yet the channel kept receiving more traffic from markets with much weaker retention.
In this YouTube Studio geography snapshot, several Western European markets showed substantially stronger average view duration than Brazil, Hungary, Poland and Russia, while those weaker-retention markets still generated more views.
Look at the countries marked with green arrows:
Italy — 1:11
Germany — 1:09
United Kingdom — 1:01
France — 1:10
Portugal — 3:11
Sweden — 3:08
Spain — 1:31
These countries were showing substantially stronger interest in the content — which is hardly surprising for a Eurodance / retro-dance project aimed primarily at European audiences.
Now look higher in the same table:
Brazil — 0:47
Hungary — 0:44
Poland — 0:56
Russia — 0:58
Despite clearly weaker retention, these countries were still generating more views than most of the stronger-retention markets below them.
The mismatch is visible on one screen:
Better retention below.
More traffic above.
Ukraine is excluded from this comparison because part of that traffic includes creator / family viewing and is therefore not a clean independent audience signal.