The YouTube Algorithm – Reasoning For AllMySubs.video

Many myths and urban legends exist regarding the YouTube Algorithm. From a higher perspective it's kind of simple, and makes a lot of sense for YouTube as a company. YouTube wants You to watch videos. The longer the better. Because, if you watch more, they can show more ads. It's as simple as that. YouTube doesn't really care, if these are good videos, or videos that you're genuinely interested in. Any video will do, as long as it is monetized. But let's break it down.

Optimizing for Watchtime

The metric that YouTube maximises is called 'Watchtime'. What's that? It's all in the name, really. YouTube is counting how many minutes (seconds, hours) You are watching a video. And not just a single video, but how long Your session on YouTube lasts. Because, most of the time, you will watch more than one video. So, at least that's the current understanding, YouTube also recognizes the video that a session started with, and the video that ended a session. That's why YouTube is recommending videos to You after You finished watching one, sometimes even playing the next one automatically.

So, the more You watch, the better for YouTube. And YouTube as a platform does everything imaginable to increase the total watchime over all viewers. Globally.

Notifications

One extremely powerful mechanism of increasing Watchtime are notifications. You don't want to miss any video, that might be interesting to You, do You? That's why there are so many notification mechanisms. You can receive emails about new videos, you receive notifications on the web page, and especially with the mobile app on Your smartphone. YouTube has to balance a lot of interests here:

There's this list of channels that You have subscribed to. It's fair to assume, that you are interested in new videos by any of those channels

If you have subscribed to a lot of channels, this might lead to many notifications. Also, channels tend to publish videos around the same time, thanks to the scheduling feature. So there's a fair probability of a couple videos going live at exactly the same time. This could lead to notifications that are considered spam by the users.

Once upon a time, you were interested in a channel, but either Your interests or the channel has changed, yet you have not unsubscribed. But also, you have not really watched any of the videos of that channel recently. Do you still want to get the notification for new videos?

There might be videos, that you would like but don't even know about yet. How cool would it be, if YouTube could predict what You will love, before You even know that channel or video exists. Well, YouTube tries, but we'll cover that later

After all, the most simple approach of showing all notifications for each and every video, might not be the best solution for YouTube. It does want to maximise the Watchtime, remember? And if a notification spam leads to a situation, which makes You disabling all YouTube notifications, You can imagine that YouTube probably would not like to get into that situation.

In summary, notifications are a great tool for YouTube to get you onto the platform and start a video watching session. And YouTube happily ignores your preferences as a user, but uses notification to maximise their key metric: Watchtime

Demonetization

Actually, YouTube want's to maximise another metric and that's revenue. It's a business and it has every right to do so. YouTube is concentrating on Watchtime, because the calculation is simple: the higher the watchtime, the more ads can be shown to the viewers.

To make things a little more complicated, there are videos that advertisers like, and videos that they don't like. There are a plethora of reasons why this is so, but usually controversal topics are considered not ad-friendly: You don't want your precious ad run before or during a video that is transporting negative emotions, I guess. Recently, YouTube has taken measures to increase the "ad friendliness" of the videos:

Channels are required to accumulate 4000h or watchtime in the last 365 days and 1000 subscribers in order to be eligible of showing ads on their Content. They can apply to be part of the Partner Program. Videos that are published by a Partner Program channel can still considered as ad unfriendly. Those videos are said to cover controversial topics. These videos are called "demonetized".

Another effect of the optimization for showing as many ad-friendly videos as possible is that YouTube treats unwanted videos specially: videos that cannot be monetized might not rank as high in search results, as they could, they might not be considered for the trends or the homepage, notifications might be surpressed, or they don't show up at all in the subscription feed.

All in all this is a highly debatable topic. The criteria that lead to demonetization are obscure and unclear, the algorithm behind it, nobody can review the uploaded content manually, still has to learn a lot. But what we know is this: YouTube want's to increase Watchtime. And from the total amount of Watchtime, the more videos are monetized and can run ads, the better.

The Triangle of Viewers, Creators and Advertisers

YouTube needs to carefully balance three contradicting expectations:

Viewers want to watch videos they like and are interested in. Creators want to publish the content they want to publish and depend on the ad generated income. Advertisers want to run ads on videos that will help them achieve their business goals with the ads.

It's pretty clear to see, that YouTube as a platform can only grow and continue to be a nice place (or get back to that actually), when all three groups have their needs satisfied, at least to a certain degree. With the recent changes regarding the YouTube Partner Program and demonatization in place, it might feel to one group that the one of the others now has larger advantages. Advertisers probably demand even stricter controls where their ads run, Creators would appreciate more freedem to express themselves and a reliable revenue stream from ads on videos, and Viewers expect a predictable platform to discover content they love.

And this is exaclty the reason why allmysubs.video was born. Maybe YouTube is working well as a platform for viewers, maybe it is suggesting videos that you will like in the future, but don't know about yet. But, nobody knows for sure. But with allmysubs.video, we can always check and be sure.