Understanding the Youtube Algorithm
You are an aspiring Youtuber. You created your channel, uploaded your channel art, and you are now ready to create amazing content about your new hobby, your new passion … astrology phone apps? You have your message and you know that people will enjoy your content. With confidence, you upload your first video and wait for the crowds to roll in. Literally 30 seconds after uploading you get your first comment. The crowds are coming early! You check your phone and read the nice comment that Tom sent you. …
It has now been two hours and you still have 5 views on your video. Despite the nice comment that Tom wrote, he apparently didn’t like the video enough to view it for at least 30 seconds. Some fan he is. “Why is this happening?” You ask yourself. “Why am I not getting millions of views like PewDiePie?” You begin looking up google searches related to every creator’s favorite part of making videos … marketing.
You stumble across a bunch of articles that offer you practical advice on marketing. After considering a couple of mildly unrealistic strategies, you settle on relying on the YouTube algorithm for your traffic. You go to bed that night happy with your long day of hard work.
“Woohoo!” says the YouTube engineer in your dreams that night. “You have discovered the secret to traffic on YouTube.” Use the YouTube algorithm. You are ecstatic. “Great! How does the YouTube algorithm work?” You ask hopefully. “I can’t tell you that.” He says. “Because I can’t read.”
The YouTube engineer flies off into the sky. Just then, another zany character under a dark hood named Morty says “Hey, I will teach you about the YouTube algorithm … for a small fee.” “What is the fee?” You ask. “Let’s just say you don’t pay with money muahahuhahauah.” You sign a legal contract without reading the fine print … Morty begins his lecture.
How the YouTube Algorithm Works ... this is the Youtube Algorithm explained
Before diving into how the algorithm works, it is first important to talk about the purpose of the algorithm, and why YouTube uses algorithms in the first place.
At its core, YouTube’s algorithm exists to serve the most personalized content to its users. YouTube “serves” it’s content through 5 main channels, the search, suggested, home, subscription, and trending tabs on YouTube. Yes, some YouTubers get a considerable amount of traffic from external sources, but this is not traffic that YouTube has DIRECT control over and it will not be the focus of this video.
YouTube’s algorithm uses a little known technology called MACHINE LEARNING … don’t think you’ve ever heard of it … have you … to run its algorithms. Now you may be asking, “why does YouTube use algorithms in the first place? Couldn’t you accomplish the same results with humans?”
To put it simply, to accomplish the same results with humans, given the hundreds of hours of content uploaded each minute to the site, YouTube would have to hire tens of thousands of workers in order to properly manage, organize, and moderate videos. This is not economically feasible. YouTube also opens itself up to additional liability when humans have a direct say in how videos are sorted and moderated. This video from the YouTuber Tom Scott does a great job in explaining this point in further detail.
YouTube’s algorithm uses hundreds of data points to find, and rank videos for maximum viewer pleasure. This process is shown with the following infographic. Yes, I understand that this infographic looks quite confusing, so I have devised a hypothetical example to help make it easier to understand!
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LEARNING:
Watch these great Youtube videos that inspired some of the ideas presented in this video:
Checkout the paper that this video is based on ... https://static.googleusercontent.com/...
Tom Scott - • Why The YouTube Algorithm Will Always Be A...
CGP Grey - • You Don't Understand How AI Learns
What is a Corpus? (Youtube Video)
• What is a corpus?
Other Sources:
https://pastebin.com/Y4hHRdzu
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Music:
Thatched Villagers Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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Other Sounds:
By zapsplat.com
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Gotten from Unsplash, Dreamstime, and other licensed sources.
A/B Testing Graphic CC License:
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