My Video Went Viral. Here's Why

Long time Veritasium subscriber here. He actually made a great video a while ago explaining why professional Youtubers don't have much of a choice when it comes to clickbaiting with titles and thumbnails, because it's the only way to reliably get lots of impressions and views and grow their channel: [VIDEO] It made me gain a bit of empathy for creators using these tactics on Youtube and tolerate it as long as it's not being used to promote content that's devoid of any substance, which is pretty much never the case for Veritasium videos or any of the other educational channels I subscribe to.

This video from Veritasium goes into more about Youtuber burnout, self-blame, dynamics and the drive to non-platform revenue streams: [VIDEO] If you find the apparent contradiction between Youtube success and creators needing to built out non-platform revenue streams strange, the video gives a pretty good theory explaining why. It's possible that a small number of creators are taking most of the revenue at any particular time, and the set of outstandingly successful creators keeps changing, which it might due to the promotion algorithm. That gives all of them reasons to build out non-platform revenue streams. I'm not saying Google/YouTube aren't taking too much. But hypothetically, even if they took 0% cut, the above could still happen.

Veritasium very recently spoke about algorithm optimizing for click through rate in the context of the bad. [VIDEO] It seems okay in this case though.

Let me Godwin it up >We're optimizing for click through rate. and so was Hitler in ~1923. Optimizing something that affects how other people act (same happens on YT Veritasium:My Video Went Viral [VIDEO] ) leads to bad outcomes (radicalization, race to the bottom, catering to lowest denominator etc).

This seems like it takes some notes from Veritasium's theory on YouTube's recommendation algorithm which he posted after his initial reservoir shade balls video went viral. (edited for clarity) [VIDEO] for his theory.

Immediate counter-arguments: Most professional YouTubers complain about having to tailor their videos to suit the recommendations algorithms. Historically, many short videos were padded out to just over 10 minutes in order to reach the minimum threshold to insert a midroll advertisement; today, many videos are as long as possible to take advantage of the algorithmic prioritisation of view time over view count. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the recent necessity to use clickbait thumbnails and titles, due to YouTube's increasing weighting of click-through-rate. [VIDEO] Most analysts believe that the high weight on view time is causing the YouTube algorithms to promote the kind of videos that their heaviest users watch . The problem is that these heavy users aren't representative of the general population - they're far more likely to be interested in conspiracy theories or extremist politics. [LINK] The vast majority of YouTube video views are as a result of algorithmic decisions by YouTube - what to show in the recommendations bar, what to prioritise on the home page, what to put at the top of search results. Those algorithms are not and cannot be neutral. These algorithms aren't just shaping which videos people watch; YouTube creators freely admit to tailoring the content of their videos to fit the recommendations algorithm.

What if YouTube just does the same, but the goal of the algorithm is not to maximize like/dislike ratios, but actual click-through rate and watch time? [1] It's an ad company after all. Also, the domain of TikTok videos seems very limited in comparison to YouTube videos, so your like-based algorithm might result in bad user retention with this broad strategy of showing random videos. So the question really is: If YouTube's algorithm is more sophisticated than TikTok's and TikTok is trying to do the same, would they still be as transparent about it? [1] [VIDEO]

Regardless how to define what's garbage and what's not, YouTube seems to remove demonetized videos from recommendations. Since I don't think that good content is always necessarily advertiser-friendly, a lot of good videos are just not getting any attention because a few big companies decided that they're not helpful to market their products. Example: Historical or educational videos which are about controversial topics or just have the word "war" in their title. Basically, their recommendations algorithm favors profit from advertising over personalized recommendations because it seems to be designed to maximize click-through rate and watch time for videos with many ads. [1] [1] [VIDEO]