Do you also have a desire to be famous on YouTube and get more likes and views or want to increase your subscribers base? Well there is a magical way to understand how you can achieve your desire i.e. by understanding “YouTube algorithm”.
Well, before indulging yourself deep into the thinking that what exactly this YOUTUBE ALGORITHM is, let’s first grab quick overview about what exactly YouTube is and how it can be helpful for us.
HISTORY:
YouTube was launched in February 14,2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim while it launched its first ever video after 10 months of its launch. YouTube is owned by GOOGLE and is the 2nd most visited website on internet today after google search. Around 2.5 billion users become a part of this YouTube sea and watch almost 1 billion hours of videos in a day. According to the rate of May 2019, videos were being uploaded at the rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute.
Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006. Google’s ownership of YouTube expanded the site’s business model, expanding from generating revenue from advertisements alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content produced by YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads.
Nowadays we can say that YouTube has become vast galaxy of millions of video clips, music videos, news, gaming videos, educational, live streams, vlogs, short films, feature films and so much more that can ever click in your mind you can search about it on this big ocean of videos i.e. YouTube.
Now, let’s talk about what is YouTube Algorithm and how it works.
WHAT IS YOUTUBE ALGORITHM?
YouTube algorithm is basically a platform that was designed to provide its users the best and easiest possible way to watch videos as long as possible and earn money by making videos on their own contents. As per today, algorithm works for the people who earn money by considering “watch time” that means how much their videos have gained watch time that determines how much the viewers find that video interesting. But it was not like this from the day it started which we’ll discuss later in this article.
Quoting the words of YouTube itself, Algorithm is a “feedback loop in real-time that recommends videos to individual viewers according to their different interests.”
But as stated above, it was not like this at the time of its launch. At the beginning, YouTube has tried to be mysterious about its algorithm so it updated its algorithm several times after its successive 16 years.
But currently, YouTube focuses more about the better user experience. But to understand how this algorithm actually shifted its mode of working, let’s just roll back to the time to understand how it started evolving.
ALL ABOUT VIEWS AND CLICKS (2005 TO 2012):
YouTube analyze your video the moment you upload it and you should know that it knows more about your content. It also analyzes your tags, titles, descriptions, thumbnails and whatever you enter in your metadata.
So, for the first seven years, it rewarded videos that got a higher number of clicks or views. At first, YouTube did not care about the user’s quality experience but later after years, it became one.
But content creators misused this algorithm approach and tricked people into getting more views, that was actually very annoying for the users, because of:
* Clickbait video titles
* Catchy thumbnails.
WATCH TIME (2012):
After this misuse by the creators, In 2012 YouTube announced its update that started prioritize considering videos that had higher attention time i.e. it shows that how much people find the video interesting and want to spend their time in this platform. You can also check the watch time on your specific video or your entire channel in the Analytic Section of YouTube.
Then content creators started increasing their video time span longer to make people watch their videos so that the watch time increases. But still, YouTube wasn’t able to provide what an individual user was looking for.
MACHINE LEARNING (2016):
YouTube then again made a successive change and achieved huge waves in market after introducing WHITE PAPER.
The paper detailed how YouTube would use machine learning and deep neural networks for its recommendation system. But it’s again a mystery how this machine learning actually works even if you ask anyone of your tacky friends. But one thing is for sure that YouTube focuses more on grabbing its user’s attention to make them hooked on this platform by upgrading its algorithms time after time.
BUT WHAT HAPPENED AFTER 2016 TO 2022?
Well among all the mysteries of YouTube it is also a mystery that how YouTube algorithm promotes recommendation of videos. In order to tackle all the raised fingers, YouTube claims that the changes made in early 2019 to its algorithm have resulted in a 70% decrease in viewing “borderline” content; a content that is under the YouTube’s guidelines and is misleading and harmful.
But according to its CEO, YouTube is taking full responsibility and doing its job seriously to stop the spreading of dangerous information.
Today, the algorithm-hood of this platform has turned its attention to achieve two main goals:
I: To recommend the videos as per the individual’s interest, and
II: To make sure to keep the individual hooked to this platform.
YOUTUBE ALGORITHM AND RECOMMENDING VIDEOS:
YouTube goes through a process of recommending videos by a process in which it interprets things in 2 folds:
- First, it shows the videos on top that are on TRENDING that means it ranks the videos that have higher performing analytics.
- Secondly, it recommends those videos that matches to the user’s like, comments, search history and the similar contents that the user has watches earlier.
So to be a successful content creator, users must keep all these guidelines about how algorithm works for a better experience.
And if you don’t follow the YouTube’s guidelines, the YouTube algorithm will also not care about the numbers you are making and if it finds your video under the guidelines, your video or even your channel will be demonetized immediately.
STEPS TO BE SUCCEFUL WITH ALGORITHMS:
If you want your content to be a successful one and want algorithm works the best for you then you must follow the steps like:
- Describing your video (a detail about the content of your video below the video) which will help grab the SEO focus.
- Another key is to be consistent to your content. Do not just make video longer but more content consistent which will lead you to the path of being the one in good words of algorithm book.
- Lastly, add some attractive title and thumbnails to your video so that it will help catching the attention of the viewers
In short, there’s a dynamic development going on in YouTube’s algorithm and being a successful content creator, you need to be thorough to your content and not violate any policies that will cause a negative impact on viewers and which is against the algorithm.
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