Best Time for YouTube Upload?

[alhallinan]

Does anyone have any data that could help us to understand the best time to upload a video to YouTube?

[KevinBudzynski]

According to this source (6 years old and college demos) :

• Higher requests occurred on weekdays than on weekends – as one would expect.

• Diurnal traffic patterns were observed – i.e. More requests occurred during the day than at night.

• Steady increase in traffic to youtube from 8am until 1pm

• Steady state of peak traffic between 2pm and 6pm

• Steady decline in traffic between 7pm and 7am

• So: Best time to upload your video to Youtube is:

  • During the week
  • Wed or Thurs is best
  • Submit your video between 12pm and 1pm as it can take up to an hour to upload and process your video. This way your video will be live during peak traffic at 2pm – that is the target.

[BrightHealth]

It shouldn't matter. There is, of course, time involved in loading & processing the video, but that is not going to impact the performance of your video. You should obviously optimize your video for search to increase visibility and views, but the time of day you upload a video shouldn't mean anything. If there is some sort of time crunch to get the video up, you should do it at least 48 hours before the deadline just to be safe. Google/YouTube protects itself by giving itself an allowance for processing, but I've never seen anything take longer than 24 hours.

[ReferralCandy]

Most data found online focus on the general public, rather than a specific group of people. While the general trend of posting on weekdays during lunch time applies, you might want to look into which times are your target audience most likely to be on Youtube.

One way to get started would be to look at what times are most of your followers are active on Facebook (through Facebook Page Insights) and Twitter (several analytics program available). From there, you would be able to gauge which time would be the best to upload your videos for maximum viewership.

Hope that helps!

[PhilNottingham]

It doesn't matter at all when you upload a video to YouTube.

Unlike social platforms such as reddit, hacker news etc - there isn't some sort of algorithmic drop off if a YouTube video doesn't get immediate traction. Videos can sit dormat for weeks before then going viral when an influencer picks them up.

The uploading time isn't important, but your wider promotional strategy will be and time may be a factor in that e.g. when do you send out a press release? When should you tweet about it?