[SOLVED] What actually breaks the YouTube algorithm?
I haven’t uploaded a tonnn of videos but I’ve had three take off before, one last night. By that I mean suddenly they’d be recommended in increasing amount and achieve hundreds to then thousands of views (I do not get thousands of views lol). I’ve noticed a few consistent factors across them namely being 1. High avg. watchtime 2. High click-through rate 3. Short clickbaity titles
Does anyone know the actual contribution of stats to getting recommended or is the algorithm still a mysterious and untamable beast?
Id post link here for reference but I just had to retype this whole thing and get times out for doing that so mjFear on yt most recent vid still in the ‘climbing’ phase I think
7 Replies
Are we talking about shorts or long form content?
Longish form, the videos that have been recommended of mine are around 40sec, two min, and three min
Got ya, so just to start, Shorts do better in views (for the most part) than regular long-form content, it's just how the Shorts system works, but I can see you make more long-form content so I'll focus on that.
YouTube says they analyze 100s of data points to decide what should be recommended based on things like avg watch time, likes, comments, etc.. to just name a few that we know of.
Then there is also who the content should be shown to, which is based on what the viewer usually watched, if your content seems like something they'd want to watch
And then you have things that relate to SEO that can help your content be found in search results, things like titles, descriptions, thumbnails, keywords, etc..
But yeah, for the most part, what makes the algorithm "tick" is largely unknown, and there definitely isn't some systematic method to guarantee a video will do well, you can just do what we know can "help" it potentially do well. I'd recommend taking a look at this link for a little more information too, it's pretty insightful Discovery and Performance FAQ: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/141805/
Discovery and performance FAQs - YouTube Help
YouTube’s search and discovery system helps viewers find the videos they’re most likely to watch and maximize long-term viewer satisfaction. Get answers about your video and channel performance wi
@big_haroldi find my videos with high ranking tags preform better or videos with a lot of tags
This is really interesting, appreciate it
Honestly I have no idea what tags are high ranking I just kinda spam them in relevance to audience lol
research low competition tags and use them until you get bigger
Sorry about the timeout, bot doesn't like links lol
YouTube mentions that keywords (tags) aren't all that important when it comes to your video being found
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/146402
Tags can be useful if the content of your video is commonly misspelled. Otherwise, tags play a minimal role in your video's discovery.When it comes to SEO, focus more on the title, description and thumbnail
Add tags to your YouTube videos - YouTube Help
Tags are descriptive keywords you can add to your video to help viewers find your content. Your video’s title, thumbnail, and description are more important pieces of metadata for your video’s dis