A YouTube Video Will Probably Never Help You Quit YouTube
Summary
From YouTube’s point of view, a YouTube video is just a set of pixels and audio that causes you to look at a screen and watch advertisements. If each video causes you to watch an advertisement and watch another video, then YouTube can chain together a long session of video->ad->video->ad->… and get multiple ad sales out of one sitting. Any video that interrupts this chain (like “how to quit YouTube” that actually makes people quit) ends the chain and YouTube misses out on the revenue from every subsequent video+ad that they could have shown. Because of this, YouTube works extremely hard to never show you videos that will cause you to break the chain and leave your screen. Therefore, you will probably never find on YouTube a video that causes you to use less YouTube.
Style/tone/content notes: This is an oversimplification and doesn’t describe all of the factors influencing a platform like YouTube. This is also a pretty typical take on engagement-based platforms and the drawbacks of optimizing for duration of user interactions. It also has a fairly negative bias against the platform, and doesn’t do a great job capturing benefits or nuances of the platform. I’m trying to convey an idea that I hope has a lot of value for some people struggling on the platform, but I’m also not happy with the tone/clarity/bias in the writing. Please let me know how I can improve.
What is the actual end goal of YouTube?
Instead of looking at what happens when a user types www.youtube.com into their web browser and working forward from there, let’s instead work backwards from the end goal of YouTube as a platform and see what steps might lead to this outcome. Thus our first question is: what is the end goal of YouTube?
To make progress towards understanding YouTube’s goal, we can look at examples of things YouTube wants to happen:
a company pays YouTube to advertise to viewers to buy a certain soda. When the viewer walks into a pizza shop later that week, they buy the soda, and the soda company makes more money on the sale than they spent having YouTube suggest it
a political campaign pays YouTube to advertise to viewers to vote for politician #7. When a viewer is in a voting booth later that month, they recognize politician #7 name, but they don’t know any of the other names. They vote #7
an airline pays YouTube to advertise to viewers to buy flights with Generic Airlines. When the viewer is looking for flights to visit family for the holidays, almost all the flights are the same price, the same duration, and the same mediocre service. The viewer feels slightly more positive about Generic Airlines because they had seen an advertisement with a smiling flight attendant on a tropical beach. The viewer buys the flight from Generic Airlines instead of the other competing airlines
What do all these examples suggest?
In all these examples, YouTube wants companies to pay money in exchange for showing a user an advertisement. As a secondary goal, the advertisement should create more value for the company than it costs, so that the company keeps buying advertisements in the future. Notice that YouTube could apply more than one ad to a user. YouTube could show the same user all 3 of the example scenarios, and get paid for all 3 ads! So YouTube wants to get paid to show advertisements, and YouTube wants to do that as many times as possible.
What is the point of the YouTube videos themselves?
Notice that our proposed goal of YouTube is to have companies pay YouTube to show users advertisements, and to do this as many times as possible. Notably in this goal statement, YouTube doesn’t actually care about the content of a YouTube video except that it causes a company to pay to place an advertisement and causes a user to view the ad and the subsequent videos.
Don’t think about a knitting tutorial on YouTube as a knitting video. Think of it as a 20 second knitting needle company advertisement, surrounded by some pixels and audio that caused a viewer to hold up their smartphone and look at the screen. Don’t think of a luxury car comparison video as a exploration of different cars, think of it as a car advertisement surrounded by pixels and audio that caused a potential car buyer to look at their computer screen. Don’t think of an election coverage video as an analysis of the political landscape, think of it as a 10 second political campaign ad surrounded by pixels and audio that caused a potential voter to sit in front of their smart TV and look at it.
To YouTube, a video is just an arrangement of pixels and sounds that causes a user to pay attention to a screen. Then, while the user is paying attention to the screen, YouTube can pause the pixels and charge a company to play an advertisement. Then, ideally the user begins the next video, repeating the cycle as many times as possible.
A critical aspect of a video is that it doesn’t break an advertisement viewing chain
Another critical feature of a YouTube video is to cause viewers to stay on the platform and continue to look at ads. Since a viewer can be shown more than one video/ad in a sitting, we can imagine a user’s journey on YouTube as follows:
Ad 0 → Pixels 1 → Ad 1 → Pixels 2 → Ad 2 → Pixels 3 → Ad 3 → Pixels 4 → Ad 4 → Pixels 5 → Ad 5 → Pixels 6 → Ad 6 → … → Pixels 37 → Ad 37 → user collapses in exhaustion at 3am, falling asleep with their phone in their hand
In this scenario, the chain of pixels showed to the user caused 38 advertisers to pay for 38 ads. Supposing each ad sold for 1c, this means the value of that chain was 38c, which is good for YouTube.
Now, let’s suppose that video Pixels 3 was titled “How to get your life together and go outside for once” and suppose the video actually worked. Everyone who watches Pixels 3 leaves their device and actually goes outside. The chain as viewed from YouTube is:
Ad 0 → Pixels 1 → Ad 1 → Pixels 2 → Ad 2 → Pixels 3 → user goes outside, notably not looking at ads anymore.
In this scenario, the chain of pixels showed to the user caused 3 advertisers to pay for 3 ads. This is awful for YouTube in comparison to the first chain. The including of Pixels 3 in this chain caused the total value to go from 38c down to 3c. Pixels 3 literally destroyed 35c of the possible 38c chain value to YouTube.
This is the core of why any searchable or reccomended YouTube video is unlikely to cause any behavior other than watching ads and watching the next video. Any video that interrupts the chain of showing you ads is bad for business. Any video that causes you to do anything other than sit in front of a screen is bad for business. If a video does anything to modify the user at all away from viewing more ads, the video is bad for business.
This is why you will almost never see in search results or get recommended a YouTube video that makes you do anything other than sit in front of a screen. YouTube would be shooting itself in the foot to show you such pixels and audio. Showing you videos that make you leave the screen interferes with the primary goal of showing you another advertisement.
What about productivity YouTubers, organization YouTubers, self-help YouTubers, etc?
We might feel like productivity videos, orginizational videos, get-your-life-together videos, or other positively-themed videos might cause the viewer to consume less YouTube videos by giving the viewers knowledge, skills, or motivation to do something else. The flawed assumption in that idea is the assumption that the video’s title and the video’s effect on the user are the same thing. In reality, nothing forces a video titled “how to get your life together” to actually cause a viewer to get their life together. If a user types “how to actually get organized” into search, YouTube could either:
Show Pixels 7649458, “How to get organized by cleaning your desk” which is a video that actually causes people to stand up and organize their desk, leading to the chain:
Ad 0 → Pixels 7649458 → user stops watching and starts organizing
Or instead, YouTube could show Pixels 294860, “How to get organized and stop wasting your life” which is a video that shows a nice looking cleaning montage, shows before and after shots, describes deep-sounding but meaningless sayings like “a clean desk is a clean mind.” The video never has a natural break for the user to leave, and the video ends with, “but a clean desk is only the first step to an organized life! Watch Pixels 3946684 which will explain how to get your life together by cleaning your closet!” The user saw what looked like a story of someone getting organized, and that organized person said the next video was important, so the user watches the next video. The chain for this might look like:
Ad 0 → Pixels 294860 → Ad 1 → Pixels 3946684 → Ad 2 → Pixels 636457465 → Ad 3 → Pixels 109494 → … → Ad 49 → user has not moved from their seat in 4 hours and collapses in exhaustion having consumed 50 ads.
Every single video in this chain can claim to get your life together. Every video can promise to make you use YouTube less. Every video can give truthful, deep, insightful information about getting your life together. The key insight is the true purpose of each video will be to cause you to watch the ad and watch the next video. No video is likely to cause any action other than watching the next video, because any other action breaks the chain and destroys value. These incentives still hold for videos titled “how to watch YouTube less” or “how to get your life together”.
Making this theory pay rent
This is an interesting story, but what would we expect to observe if this model of YouTube is true? Let’s make this idea pay rent in both expected and forbidden experiences like in Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences):
Things this model predicts:
Suggested videos and search results will favor monetized videos (show ads), videos without ads will rarely be suggested or show up in search
Suggested videos and search results might not be related to what you just watched or what you searched, but rather are chosen by if they will cause you to watch ads and watch another video (irrelevant but engaging videos in watch next and search results)
Platform designed to engourage next video watching (autoplay, suggested next videos, reccomended, calls to action to watch next videos (“if you liked this video, I think you will love my next video about...”))
Videos promoted by the platform will rarely contain calls to action involving leaving the platform or doing anything other than watching the next video+ad
Search results for questions that could be answered in one short video will be long analysis videos with ads, and will end without a satisfying answer, prompting the user to contine watching additional explanations or unrelated content
Suggested videos and search results will rarely leave viewers with a sense of fullness, completion, satisfaction, or enough-ness. Videos will tend to end with a question or non-answer, leaving the viewer with a longing for the next video to provide relief (it never will, it will end in a way that encourages another video)
This model somewhat forbids/predicts-won’t-happen:
Popular, promoted, searchable videos that are demonitized/ad-free
Popular, promoted, searchable videos that have a working call to action causing viewers to leave the platform (example of something unlikely under the selling ads chain theory: “if you liked this video, promise me you will power off your computer and phone immediately and reflect on your relationship with technology for the next 48hrs”)
Platform changes making watching the next video harder or less automatic, like removal of next video autoplay, or removal of end-of-video suggestions
Popular, promoted, searchable videos that leave viewers satisfied and complete, ready to put down their device and move on with life
Search result videos that clearly and concisley answer the question without leading into further exploration/questions/viewing
Conclusion
A YouTube video will almost certainly not cause you to get your life together, get organized, use your devices less, go outside, spend more time with friends, or any other non-sitting-in-front-of-a-screen activity. A YouTube video is just pixels and audio that causes you to watch ads. If a certain arrangement of pixels caused you to do any action other than continue watching pixels and ads, it would break a chain of viewing and destroy value for YouTube. This is true even of videos titled “How to get your life together” or “How to use YouTube less.” If you pay attention, these videos almost never have immediately actionable call-to-actions, and they almost always chain nicely into a subsequent video. Videos with such titles are pixels the same as any other, with the same incentives as any other, chosen carefully to make you watch ads and keep the chain of videos+ads long.
Pixels that change your life may/do exist, it is simply not likely that YouTube will show those pixels to you. Any video that actually causes users to do any action other than continue watching will be measured to be a chain breaker and value destoryer, and YouTube will avoid suggesting it or putting it in search results. YouTube may have millions of videos that would cause viewers to use less YouTube, but YouTube is incentivized never to show any of them.
If you want to reduce the amount of time you spend in front of a screen, and you search for how on YouTube, know that everything presented to you has been experimentally verified to not cause the exact results you seek.
If you want to do anything other than watch a long chain of pixels and ads, do not type www.youtube.com into your browser.
Details, nuances, “it’s complicated”
1. YouTube is not a person or a single-goal entity. In this writing YouTube was somewhat personified and assigned goals, and that is not literally how the platform works. Any platform that big is a disjointed, many-team-many-person organization with different goals all throughout. Maybe a certain manager wants a certain metric to improve in order for that specific manager’s promotion cycle. Maybe a passionate content moderation engineer really does care about the content of some of the pixels. Please use this model as a quick, visceral tool to understand what is going to happen if you visit the site, but please understand in reality the platform is not a single entity and doesn’t have goals this simply.
2. The algorithm might not be as simple as “maximize showing ads and chain length.” For example, advertisers track how much an advertising campaign causes sales to change, and adjust their willingness to pay accordingly. This leads to features like YouTube’s “are you still watching?” check, which makes sure that showing pixels+ads has a chance of influencing a user’s buying behavior (Advertisers don’t wan’t to pay for ads played on an unwatched laptop screen). Or maybe certain ads might be so valuable that the platform might want you to leave for the ad, since the value of that exceeds the value of the rest of the chain you would have watched. Or maybe a platform is competing with another platform in a way that pressures them in different directions. Or maybe a platform has legal issues or payment processor issues or corporate image issues that make them care about Pixels 7 in a context other than pure showing-ads-long-chain. Or maybe a new platform is focusing on user growth and isn’t maximizing ads yet. Or maybe a platform has more than one monetization method and sometimes tries to funnel users between these methods. Or maybe the CEO has a moving conversation with someone at a party and pushes the platform in a slightly different direction for non-ads reasons. This pixels, ads, chains model is oversimplified and doesn’t explain everything. Please don’t over-apply this simplification.
3. The same concept applies to many ad-supported digital platforms. You probably won’t watch a tiktok that makes you quit tiktok either.
4. I realize both the tone and content in this are emotional and biased, and that is making some (all?) of the points less factual and more exaggerated. I realize the things I say are certainly biased by feeling used and deceived by ad-based platforms. I don’t like putting stuff like that out into the world, but at the same time I wish I had read something like this a few years ago, and I hope that this writeup can help some readers spend potentially hundreds of hours per year in ways more aligned with their goals. If anyone has writing advice, suggested revisions, tone suggestions, or anything else, please let me know.
5. I don’t fully know how adblockers play into this theory. My current initial guess is that a platform values network effects, market dominance, and potential future monitization enough that they will continue serving users with adblockers while trying to convert them to ad watchers. Or maybe at some point in the future, platforms will start turning away users that never watch ads? (trials of messages like: Adblockers are against the YouTube Terms of Service, disable your adblocker to continue watching)?
A video titled “How to quit YouTube” could teach quitting strategies and then ask its viewers to play it cool for another hour, act like they’re still stuck in the loop, so the video will still be recommended to people like them. It’d rescue all the one-boxers.
Good thought! Maybe a different approach to the same goal: sometimes if I watch a really good video but want to leave YouTube, I’ll search for something I don’t like and then leave partway through, hopefully putting most of the leaving penalty on something I don’t like.
I see what you’re going for here, and I like when people output work that probably has net benefit on well being. That being said, I see some soft spots in your model, and I’m gonna poke some holes. I should note however, that I mostly just skimmed this post. It’s likely I’m about to make a fool of myself.
First, I think your core claim is kinda correct. A YT video probably wont make you quit YT. However, that’s not really what happens when people quit YT. It’s more like this:
That’s still a wild oversimplification. When I quit YT, it was mainly thanks to the Cortex Podcast, but YT videos certainly played a big part in updating me every time I watched a “Your Wasting Your Life Blah Blah Blah”.
Also, addiction is hard. Fluctuate in and out of behavior before they find something that ‘sticks’ and they quit for the long term.
But TLDR: People update incrementally over a long period of time, and idk how good the YT algorithm is at tracking what videos, over a 1-2 year period, were the most important updates towards the final decision to quit the platform.
From memory, Scott the Woz, is a super popular YTber, and he does not put ads on his videos.
I’m pretty sure YT claims that monetization status has no impact on the algorithm. Though, I am skeptical of this claim.
I think these are pretty true to how YT works. I’ll add that I think PH and similar sites probably employ this in a more intense way, but with a catch. A site like PH would want to eventually satisfy you, because being the app that… ends your session, has big ‘cum back again’ return.
Let me know if I missed the point, and am totally mistaken somewhere here.
Many good points and good question about how people actually quit! I don’t know for sure how people quit, and this post mainly addresses the narrower case of a single video causing someone to quit immediately for some measurable amount of time. Two mechanisms being considered right now: people quit on one dramatic change, versus people incrementally update over time until they ease over the boundary of quitting. It would be cool to see surveys of people who quit and see if quitting is gradual or something suddenly clicks.
It would also be interesting to what extent YouTube can deduce what videos correlate with users quitting and punish them regardless of their immediate chain breaking. For example, YouTube could look at two batches of comparable viewers, half who saw a certain video and half who didn’t, and see how many are still viewing an hour, day, week, month, and year later. I suspect with enough data YouTube could find some connections.
Additionally, maybe YouTube could gather user leaving or use reduction stats by channel rather than viewer. That way YouTube could gain confidence that a certain channel rarely makes people leave, so YouTube can recommend the content quickly while it is still relevant.
As for ad free success, I’m not sure if it is the same for all users but I searched Scott the Woz and clicked on the first video and got a pre-roll video ad, then clicked a second video with no ad, then clicked on the next Scott video and got a sponsored ad below the video.
Thanks for all the great points, I suppose it’s time to start making additional predicted observations for these different directions and see!
Wow. Diabolical. I have never thought of this. Grateful to have this pointed out to me.
Actually, that makes sense. I’m making a prediction, that if I check the first Scott video when I search his name, the description will say something like “This video contains copyrighted content from XYZ-Corp and has been claimed”. Going to check that now… Nope. Incorrect prediction. I was wrong there.
I know that I get that message, in my video descriptions, when I have copyrighted content in the video. Checking that now. And wow! This part of the description has gotten some pretty insane updates since I last looked at it.
This is in the description for a video in which I reviewed 10+ different movies. The owners of those songs have put claims on this video. and they-at least, used to-run ads on this un-monetized video.
I started writing a post on this, and collecting some data. But have now realized it’s a much bigger project than I anticipated. But I agree that this would be interesting data.
Disclaimer : I was short on time but I think I got most of it, sorry if I’m missing something or if my comment is a bit lacking, I had to do this fast.
I agree that YouTube’s end goal is revenue generation but it seems to me you’re considering that YouTube’s content recommandation algorithm is optimized for revenue generation via advertising, which I believe to be untrue. From what I have gathered following the ecosystem (I’m interested in it because I have a relatively successful YouTube channel) along the years, that is not the case.
The recommandation algorithm is not a monolithic system : each YouTube account has its own personal algorithm which mostly relies on the 1000 last videos watched by the account. The current goal is said to be “make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube”. Like you said, YouTube wants people to stay on the platform and that’s because over time, people will spend money on YouTube : this option has been growing significantly in the last 10 years with live options, superlikes, Boost, memberships, YouTube Premium, among other possibilities.
The advertising algorithm is completely decoupled from the content recommandation algorithm. The only relation with it is the fact that specific videos (+18 content for instance) will show only specific ads.
With time, YouTube is trying to decouple AdSense’s revenues from YouTube’s viability as a platform like I outlined earlier. Of course, ads will always pay more because they are that valuable but there is now a very much growing YouTube economy outside of ads. I could go look at the financial results to see if there’s more info there.
Therefore, a successful “Quit YouTube” video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it’s not good for ads but because it is stopping the user’s satisfaction with YouTube.
The point about non-ad revenue is a super interesting point that I completely missed in the first pass, thank you for bringing that up! I think we could change the main claim to something more like: “as long as YouTube gets more revenue the more a user uses the site, then YouTube is incentivized not to show you videos that cause you to leave” or similar.
As for “make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube” I’m not sure how they measure that? It could be anything from survey results, to a predicted score based on certain behaviors. If they were really sneaky, they could use time spent watching as a proxy metric for satisfaction. I really don’t know here what they are targeting or how they measure it.
As for ad algorithm being decoupled from recommendation algorithm, that is another interesting aspect, but I think the goal is still “keep people watching ads so we have another opportunity to run the ‘best ad for this moment’ model on them again”.
As for the conclusion sentence “Therefore, a successful “Quit YouTube” video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it’s not good for ads but because it is stopping the user’s satisfaction with YouTube.” I am still not entirely convinced by pinning the conclusion on user satisfaction. It seems more likely to me that YouTube is a revenue machine rather than a satisfaction machine, otherwise they would just turn off ads entirely. I would still lean towards something like “Therefore, a successful “Quit YouTube” video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it’s not good for ads but because it is stopping the user’s future interactions that have a chance of being monetized in any manner of ways, including superlikes, memberships, ads, etc”
Thanks again for the thoughts and the non-ad direction, lots to think about!
I think that’s a fair assessment, I did not want to make it look like YouTube was a non profit haha, mostly that they have found that by sacrificing some money on the short term, they make sure they’re earning a ton on the long term.
They are not really in control of what becomes viral or not. Of course, I’m sure they can push or ban one specific video but how could they be aware that a video is going to buzz about leaving YouTube? There’s just too much content and some parts of the ecosystem are completely oblivious to mega hits videos (like videos with 10s or sometimes even 100s of millions of views, are simply never showed to some spectators). My point is that it’s the algorithm deciding at scale and not YouTube. In its current state I also believe it would likely push it at first but then the video would plummet if it worked and could even be negative for the creator long term. Of course there’s also the possibility that people watch videos but never follow through with them however good they are to making people act. (that’s actually the base behavior lol, watching content has become a drug nowadays)
You’re not far away from what they do! Through the years they have tried several ways to measure what’s good, first with click through rate and % of video watch, then moving more towards total watch time (which is when longer videos started becoming the norm) and more recently towards watch time in session. (meaning the best behavior is people coming to YouTube for your video and then watching other videos after that) If you come to YouTube to watch a single video, the watch time better be very significant or it will be negative for the content you watched because they would rather have you longer on the platform.
About two years ago they have started saying that they were aiming for viewer satisfaction which is indeed pretty hard to describe but a mix of the different type of watch times is likely already good, to which they indeed add regular viewer polls to ask how you felt about recommandations and videos.
Nowadays, it’s obviously become a mix of many different signals, with different values given to each. Contrary to popular belief, likes and comments are pretty much worthless to the algorithm. (although likes may have gotten a tiny bit of value back)
There is growing competition (even in long form videos which is much harder to setup than short form for a platform) so despite them being pretty much a monopoly, I don’t think they are going for a full profit strategy. I think the AI debacle will keep Google in a competitive mind for sometime. On the other hand, when you’re already so profitable, it may be a viable strategy to leave some money on the table in order to remain a de facto monopoly by making any competitor bleed money.
Also, from what I gathered, the shorts algorithm is very much different from the normal videos because the people watching short form and long have very different usage of the platform. Not sure if there’s something different in how YouTube makes it work though, might just be because of audience behavior.
It’s like a weird version of anthropic reasoning.
I think that YouTube specifically is now safely beyond the growth phase and deep in the extraction phase. But another thing to consider is how many people use the adblockers. If only a few, it is not worth blocking them. Every change has a cost, especially at a gigantic corporation like Google. Plus there is a small but nonzero chance of introducing a bug, which could disrupt the showing of the ads. So I would say that if the fraction of people who use adblockers stay below 1%, they will be an annoyance, but never a sufficiently high priority.
How do you think this applies to paid YouTube accounts? I have one, and I don’t ever see YouTube ads. I still see the in-video ads that the artists insert into their videos, but even then I can skip them easily, and YouTube actually makes that easier, since I can skip forward twice and I get a button to skip the segment.
YouTube is pretty far along the enshitification curve. I don’t see them changing things enough to turn that ship around.
Good question on paid accounts. At that point, I would guess YouTube would want to see if higher watch time correlates with lower cancellations. If more watching means less cancellations, then maybe YouTube is still financially incentivized to keep someone watching.