Yeah you need to learn how to read panels
Here are some basic tips
there are 3 types of main retention used, short, medium and long
Short retention is typically 10 second to 5 minute, with most decent services being between 2 and 5 minutes, usually these are the most reliable for alot of reasons, theyre generally the most cost effective. Justanotherpanel for example offered a .96 cent up t 5' minute retention until recently, its now 1.44 after coppa updates, but for along time, that service would constantly send orders into processing for overload, and generally most panels have the same type of services, very short retention which always costs the most, short middle retention which is 2 to 5 minutes, and then rarely on occasion middle retention which is 10+ minutes
If it doesnt list the retention time it means its random and random is less than 30 seconds
If it lists 10' vs 10 the 10' means 10 minutes
services that take a week to deliver also may be unrelated to your time of purchase for example, if you purchased during a coppa update that particular type of watch time may have stopped working after you placed your order
The last type of retention is long, which is 1+ hours
Last June after youtubes major first update watch time prices spiked due to it becoming much harder to get monetized, and thats when long retention started popping up, most notably followiz
As a side note, if you checked followizs pilot trust score before youtubes updates last summer it was much higher, its currently 1.8/5, and this is mainly due to the issues with retention that happened last summer, the panel had issues already but thousands of people lost their orders when youtube updated. Long retention then split into other types of retention such as 2 and 3 hour, and then a series of other changes came out such as ads beginning to see more use in september, and then until december when youtube stopped counting truview campaigns for monetization hours
So you see it can change and vary so you need to have a network in place relying on 1 or a few panels for various services is a very small window, if you were just using followiz for watch time, you would have a very angry view towards alot of panels, when thats not the case. If you take the average cost of watch time as well right now from many of the major panels, smm-heaven, justanotherpanel, smmlite, qqtube, smmkings, they all generally have the same prices aside from certain specific non watch time orders which you could use separately. But if your only using them smaller competitive smm panels which have better pricing will get pushed out of the picture, its similar to saying target has terrible service when ebay exists, and then amazon, and then ali express
Anyway bit of a tangent, but the point is you have to know how to read panels and navigate it especially if your investing alot of money, that should be your goal, my personal way of testing was to invest the minimum amount per panel for the tests i wanted and move on, what stuck i pursued and scaled
and thats how you effectively build a link of resources with minimal spending and maximized testing, anyone can do this strategy