Mediaboss Marketing

YouTube has published a new overview of how its content recommendations system works, which is one of the central drivers of video reach and views on the platform, and may help YouTube marketers get a better understanding of what guides optimal response.

YouTube actually published a similar overview earlier in the year, as part of its ongoing effort to maximize transparency, with this new explainer giving a little more historical insight as to how its systems have evolved, and how its working to improve its processes.

As explained by YouTube:

Our recommendation system is built on the simple principle of helping people find the videos they want to watch and that will give them value.

Of course, value is a fairly vague term in social media metrics, and especially in measurement, but the idea, according to YouTube, is to show people more of what they like, based on not only their own behaviors, but other, similar users as well.

You can find recommendations at work in two main places: your homepage and the Up Next panel. Your homepage is what you see when you first open YouTube - it displays a mixture of personalized recommendations, subscriptions, and the latest news and information. The Up Next panel appears when youre watching a video and suggests additional content based on what youre currently watching, alongside other videos that we think you may be interested in.

The Up Next panel has been one of the more scrutinized elements of the platform in recent years, with some users saying that these recommendations can lead them down conspiracy-fueled rabbit holes, and even radicalize them based on the content they find.

So how might that happen?

Here are some of the key notes on exactly how YouTubes recommendations process works.

Foundationally, YouTubes recommendations are based on four key elements:

All of these elements you likely could have guessed would be factored in, so theres no major insight, necessarily. Though it is also interesting to note that YouTube additionally seeks to help you find content that you might not even know exists, based on the content that other people with similar viewing profiles to you watch.

So if you like tennis videos and our system notices that others who like the same tennis videos as you also enjoy jazz videos, you may be recommended jazz videos,even if youve never watched a single one before.

Thats likely how people come across those conspiracy theory trails you look up one video on a topic that youre interested in, then YouTube hits you with a range of related viewing that other people have watched as a result. If you fall into the wrong viewer profile, that could lead to a host of questionable stuff though YouTube does also note that it is working to address such recommendations, and limit exposure to what it identifies low quality content.

So what qualifies as low quality in this context?

Weve used recommendations to limit low-quality content from being widely viewed since 2011, when we built classifiers to identify videos that were racy or violent and prevented them from being recommended. Then in 2015, we noticed that sensationalistic tabloid content was appearing on homepages and took steps to demote it. A year later, we started to predict the likelihood of a video to include minors in risky situations and removed those from recommendations. And in 2017, to ensure that our recommendation system was fair to marginalized communities, we began evaluating the machine learning that powers our system for fairness across protected groups - such as the LGBTQ+ community.

In addition to these, YouTube also bans content that includes false health claims (like COVID conspiracy clips), while its also taking more steps to address political misinformation. Some of this type of material still gets through, of course, but YouTube is working to improve its systems to ensure that such material is not recommended via its discovery tools.

A key consideration in this element relates to authoritative or borderline content.

In seeking to limit the reach of borderline clips those that dont necessarily break the platforms rules, but do present potentially harmful material YouTube uses human evaluators to assess the quality of information in each channel or video.

These evaluators hail from around the world and are trained through a set of detailed,publicly available rating guidelines. We also rely on certified experts, such as medical doctors when content involves health information.

To determine authoritativeness, YouTube says that its evaluators answer a few key questions:

YouTubes evaluators assess the reputation of a channel/creator based on a range of qualifiers, including online reviews, recommendations by experts, news articles and Wikipedia entries (you can check out the full listing of potential qualifiers here).

All in all, the system is designed to utilize explicit and implicit signals to highlight more of what each person wants to see, while also filtering out the worst kinds of content, in order to limit potential harm. The actual specifics of harm are a factor in this calculation, and limiting that reach -but again, YouTube says that it is working to update its recommendation tools to ensure higher quality content, based on these qualifiers at least, ends up getting more exposure in the app.

YouTube has also shared this overview of how its recommendations algorithms have evolved over time.

In assessing the various measures from a marketing and performance perspective, the key consideration is audience response, and creating content that appeals to your target viewers.

You can measure this in your YouTube analytics, and with users able to directly subscribe to your channel, there are some strong, key indicators that you can use to assess your performance, and ensure youre aligning with viewer interests. That will then see your content also shown to other people with similar audience traits, while ensuring that you have a good website reputation, and a strong general web presence, will also limit potential penalties in YouTube moderators assessment.

Its also worth checking your content against the above listing of authoritativeness as a quick measure that youre adhering to YouTubes goals.

None of these elements will guarantee ultimate reach success, but failing to tick the right boxes will limit your potential. Its worth noting these keys, and considering each aspect in your marketing effort.

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YouTube Shares Overview of its Content Recommendation Systems, and the Key Factors that Define Reach - Social Media Today