YouTube has changed the rules for counting video rating

In an effort to increase the time users spend on the site, the video that holds the viewer's attention will rise higher and higher in search results.

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YouTube’s ongoing efforts to keep visitors on its pages took a new turn today when the video portal announced that it will begin to take into account the rating of the video on how long people have been watching it.
This action makes it more difficult to bypass the system when the author deliberately chose an intriguing thumbnail for the video so that users intentionally click on it. Instead, the creators will be rewarded for actually making the viewers watch the whole video.
These changes will most of all affect the films that viewers watch more than others, thereby improving their rating, and vice versa, they will lower the films they visit and then immediately leave them.
Thanks to these actions, it was possible to achieve an increase in the duration of the audience’s stay on the site, YouTube reports today. A new search ranking algorithm should have a very positive effect.
To help video creators adapt to the new rating system, YouTube has added a “viewing time” label to YouTube analytics.

Taken from youtube-now-ranking-videos-by-time-watched-not-clicks