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 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”
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)
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.
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.
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.