Why LinkedIn is spotlighting the average watch time metric to support its video push

To learn more about LinkedIn’s decision to make average video watch times available to creators on the platform, Digiday spoke to LinkedIn vp of product Gyanda Sachdeva. Here are some of the key takeaways.

The numbers

• LinkedIn’s definition of a video view is two or more continuous seconds of playback while a video is at least 50 percent visible onscreen, per Sachdeva, which is in line with the Media Rating Council’s definition.
• LinkedIn generally considers short-form videos to be any video under two minutes in length, according to a company rep, who stressed that this was not a formal definition. 
• On average, five LinkedIn video creators reached for comment by Digiday reported average watch times of roughly 15 seconds for their videos on the platform — and higher watch times than some rival platforms. Creator Terry Rice, for example, posted the same video across Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok, receiving an average watch time of 5.3 seconds on TikTok, vs. 20 seconds and 22 seconds respectively on Instagram and LinkedIn. (LinkedIn’s higher average watch times was not what inspired the company to make the metric visible to users, per Sachdeva.)

A boon for both brands and creators

At the moment, LinkedIn makes three metrics available to video creators: video views, total watch time and average watch time. The average watch time metric — whose rollout this week follows the launch of a similar “view rate” stat on Instagram last week — is of particular interest to creators because it can help them give prospective sponsors a more concrete sense of reach and engagement.

The introduction of LinkedIn’s average watch time metric is evidence that the platform is paying attention to the metrics that creators can leverage to monetize their presences on their platform. Although Sachdeva said that LinkedIn’s primary goal in offering this data was to put more information in the hands of creators, rather than to empower brands, she acknowledged that Linkedin was “starting to have conversations on the marketing side about what this means for marketers.”

“This can impact how much brands are willing to pay a creator,” Rice said. “Sure, they may reach 500,000 with a video, but if the average watch time is 3 seconds, they aren’t effectively getting their message across.”

A work in progress

Although content creators on LinkedIn are generally supportive of the company’s video push, this week’s expansion of video features and metrics still came with some growing pains. One complaint among some content creators was the relative inaccessibility of the new average watch time metric. Users can only access it by clicking through to each video’s individual analytics page, which makes it hard to compare average watch time across multiple videos. 

“Someone like myself, who has had millions and millions of impressions and a lot of hours of watch time, has been wanting a tool like this,” said Gigi Robinson, a LinkedIn video creator who told Digiday that her videos on the platform, which summarize and comment on news related to the creator economy, had garnered over 52 million impressions in January 2025. “But if it’s not easily accessible, what’s the point?”

And although LinkedIn has released a general list of best practices for video creators, the platform is still relatively reticent regarding the specific metrics that its video algorithm is currently prioritizing, sharing few details about the impact of a video’s length or posting time on its performance.

LinkedIn’s algorithm resurfaces connected content

A key challenge for LinkedIn’s video feed is determining the balance between connected content — videos from creators whom users actively follow — and unconnected content, or potentially relevant videos from unfollowed creators. For now, the platform is not striving for a fixed ratio between these two types of content, according to Sachdeva, who told Digiday that LinkedIn’s algorithm starts out by prioritizing connected content, but increases the ratio of unconnected content as a user watches more videos.

“People who have large networks tend to have a lot of connected content when they come back to LinkedIn, and less unconnected,” she said, “but if they start engaging with more of the unconnected over time, then we shift the balance towards unconnected.”

One notable feature of LinkedIn’s algorithm is that it has a tendency to resurface connected content weeks or months after its initial publication, a feature that is generally not an aspect of other video platforms’ feeds.

“For connected content, we do have look-back windows that are further out, so that people don’t miss out on the content from their network,” Sachdeva said. “What we’ve noticed with video is that a lot of this content is not necessarily just relevant for today or this week; it’s evergreen. Identifying that evergreen content in the topics that you’re interested in is something that the team does intentionally.”

LinkedIn wants demographic data to be its differentiating factor

In addition to these more traditional video stats, Sachdeva highlighted the value of LinkedIn’s professional user base for creators, pointing out that LinkedIn already allows creators to see demographic data about the users who view their content. 

“When we have the aggregate data, we can break it down by location and by title, and that is super helpful for professional content creators to know if they’re getting in front of the right audience or not, and that’s already unique to us,” Sachdeva said. “The audience is very different, and what creators will consider a signal, in terms of ROI, is bound to be different as a result of that.”

Although LinkedIn remains more of an experimental platform for video creators at the moment, the company believes more creators will make the jump to LinkedIn for the opportunity to put themselves directly in front of marketers, investors and other decision-makers of the business world.

As an example, she cited the experience of a marketing content creator who was satisfied to find out that a significant proportion of his viewers were company founders or CEOS after checking his post analytics last year.

“This is an easier way to reach the decision-makers than anything else. Their email inbox is getting 500 emails a day of pitches, but I bet they’re not getting tagged in more than three things a week on LinkedIn,” said Sam Saideman, a LinkedIn content creator and CEO of the influencer marketing agency Innovo. “So I think video makes sense on LinkedIn if you are trying to develop awareness, positioning, thought leadership or a sales conversion for whatever you’re doing.”