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[YouTube Recommendations] Ask us anything! YouTube Team will be here Friday February 8th. 13 Recommended Answers 211 Replies 2769 Upvotes
Last edited 2/4/19
We’re excited to share a unique opportunity with you. The team working on YouTube recommendations would like to hear questions and feedback about your experience and in return, they’ll share their knowledge with you.
Who is the YouTube recommendations team?
The YouTube recommendations team is responsible for the recommendations you see on your Home feed, in the Up Next list of suggested videos, and for YouTube Mixes, which provides endless playlists personalized for you. Several Product Managers from the team will be here to answer your questions.
Here are some potential questions you could ask the team:
- I’ve recently created a channel and have been uploading videos for months. I’ve had good growth in views in the beginning but now it looks like YouTube is recommending my content less. What is changing with the algorithm?
- I keep on pressing not interested, but similar videos continue to show up on my Home feed. Is there anything else I can be doing to fine tune my recommendations?
- Why do my Up Next suggested videos have so many videos that are not related to the video I’m watching?
Starting today: you can submit your questions and feedback related to recommendations using the comments below and on Friday February 8th at 9:30am PST, our YouTube recommendations team will be here answering as many questions as possible – right here on this thread.
Please mind! The team will only be addressing questions related to recommendations on YouTube in relation to the Home page, Up Next suggestions in autoplay, and YouTube Mixes. Questions around search, subscriptions, trending, notifications, among other non-recommendations related questions will not be addressed because this team only works on recommendations and are not in a position to answer questions in other areas. As such, we will be removing any non-recommendations, off-topic questions.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Felicitas
Community Manager, TeamYouTube
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Recommended Answer Recommended Answers (13)
Recommended Answer
Hi! I'm Todd and I work on the recommendations team. I noticed that there were quite a few questions that creators had about discovery.
Q: Hello Over the last year my channel has had a nice growth on youtube search, but gets less and less suggested video views. How can I improve my odds for being suggested? Thanks
A: Suggested videos are recommendations on the watch page that viewers may be interested in watching next. These videos include personalized recommendations, based on the viewer’s previous watches, and videos that are topically related.
- You may want to consider these tactics to increase traffic for Suggested.
- At the end of your videos, make strong calls-to-action to encourage the viewer to watch another video in your series.
- Avoid overlong endings that delay viewers from watching more.
- Consider using playlists, links, cards and end-screens to promote another video.
- Develop a series or show of videos that are organically connected.
- Check out our Creator Academy course for more tips!
Q: What has changed in the algorithm and what tips do you have to get videos recommended? Do I work on the title more? the thumbnail? the Tags? What do I need to focus on? thanks :)
A. The algorithms change constantly based on billions of bits of audience feedback. What doesn't change is our principles, which include delivering recommendations most likely to satisfy the audience and keep them coming back to YouTube over the long-term. Our algorithms listen to the audience and so we recommend that you do the same.
Thumbnails and titles are the primary sources of information viewers see when deciding which videos to watch, and therefore have a lot of impact on how a recommendation impression converts to a view. Then the video itself has to deliver on the promise of the title and thumbnail to interest the viewer in watching more videos from your channel. Once you convert a viewer to watch make sure that it is a great video they will enjoy.
Viewers don't see tags and we have found them to be of limited value in understanding which viewers are likely to be interested in watching the video. A good rule of thumb is to focus on what the viewer sees the most, and that's the thumbnail, and title and of course, the video.
If you have to pick only one thing to focus on, it would be creating the content that satisfies viewers and keeps them coming back.
Q: In what scenario YouTube recommends videos in anyone's page. Is there any particular time duration for any videos to get promoted. because some videos getting better views in the morning and drops by evening
A. There are no rules about video length or amount of impressions per video when it comes to recommendations. We want viewers to discover the videos that are most satisfying to them, whether they’re a few seconds long or a few hours, and whether the video has been recommended to a billion other people or no one.
In terms of time of day, some videos performs better when recommended in the morning, because some people have morning habits like watching the news or working out. The same might hold true for other times of day. It really depends on when your viewers are watching.
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Hi! I work on the homepage experience, answering a question below about why you may see videos from your subscriptions on home.
Q: Why are so many videos in recommended from my subscribed channels? I have those in my subscriptions, I don't want them in recommended too. They're taking up space that could have been used for other videos, which are related to what I like/watch but are from channels which I do not follow.
A: We aim to reach viewers with videos they are interested in watching wherever they happen to be, and our home feed is designed to bring whatever is most engaging and satisfying to you front and center, whether you’re subscribed or not. We’ve found that some viewers prefer their homepage to be only familiar content from subscriptions, while others want the opposite. We aim to give each viewer what they like, and your feedback is helpful in reminding us that we either need to do a better job at learning that or give you the ability to tell us in the product.
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Q: How does YouTube’s algorithm work to recommend me old videos of a person who is currently on the news ?
A: If someone is in the news, that often coincides with some viewers searching for videos about the person and watching them. If enough viewers do this, we might recommend the video to more people.
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Q: Hi. Can we have some manual filters with the recommended videos please? I would like the option to select which type of video I want to watch (ie Fishing), where the video was made/published (ie UK) and how old the video is (ie 0 to 6months old/ Less than a year old/ More than a year old etc). A slot reserved in the recommended videos for new creators would be an encouraging feature too. Thanks :-)
A: Thank you for the great suggestions. Our team will explore both ideas around manual filters. Note that YouTube Search already enables you to filter by attributes like upload date and video duration, and sort by things such as view count.
We care about helping new creators get started and continue to invest in improvements to ensure new creators get a fair chance in recommendations. We’ve also been expanding our creator on the rise program, and recently added Gaming Creators on the Rise to our Trending tab.
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Q: I talk a lot about movies/television in my content and as a result I often see the majority of videos that YouTube recommends next to *my* videos are movie rentals instead of actual YouTube content. Are you aware of this happening and can we expect more balance to the recommendations tab in the future?
A: Thanks for the feedback. We hadn’t heard this before, and are now looking into some improvements to ensure there’s a diverse set of results.
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Q: Is the Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations paper still accurate, or have you moved on with technology to something different?
A. A lot of the fundamental principles are the same, but we have made hundreds of improvements since the paper was written. Among them is the addition of satisfaction survey responses, which helps us understand what sorts of videos viewers really enjoy in a way we can’t understand simply by observing the amount of time they spent watching them.
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Q: Does quality of video resolution matter during recommendations?
A: Only if it matters to the viewer in terms of how much it satisfies them.
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There were quite a few questions about video metadata (thumbnails, tags, titles, descriptions). Here are some answers about what to focus on.
Q. I don't set certain words as tags if those words already appear in the title or description. Should I set them as tags, even though those words appear in titles and in description?
A. No. Focus on the thumbnail, title, and description and don’t worry too much about tags.
Q. I'm part of YPP. I don't just want more watch count but I want viewers who stick around until the end of the video. In order to grow this kind of viewers, do you think it's better to have less metadata like tags and video description?
A. The tags and video description aren’t nearly as important in attracting qualified viewers as your thumbnail and title, so we’d recommend focusing on thumbnails and titles that deliver on what they promise (a great video!)
Q: Does editing a title, description or thumbnail after uploading affect how much a video is recommended?
A. It depends on whether the updates make them better (for the viewer), worse, or about the same. There is no disadvantage in the system related to updating these, so if you think you have an improvement, give it a try.
Last edited 2/8/19
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Q: Why are you recommending videos from ~10 years ago?
A: Just like the radio plays songs from 10 years ago and reruns are common on TV, many viewers enjoy watching older videos in addition to newer ones. We don’t force any limit to the age of recommendations on YouTube, and if we did, viewers would miss out on a lot of great content. A high proportion of time spent on YouTube is on videos published more than a month ago (and it’s not because we bias in favor of older videos… viewers engage with older videos at an even higher rate than we recommend them).
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I work on helping you discover new videos, and I saw a few questions about why specific categories of videos were recommended, so I rounded those up below:
Q: Can you please explain why if you watch one video in a specific category/genre why you get recommended it a bunch even though it was just one video.
A: One technique our recommendation systems use is to recommend other videos watched by people with similar interests. We find that in general, this is a useful approach in helping viewers find more videos to watch that they’ll enjoy based on what they’ve watched before.
That said, we also recognize that not all viewers want to keep watching more related content after watching one or two videos, even though some do. We also offer the “Not interested” feedback option to help our systems understand if this is not a topic or channel you are interested in.
Q: Why do I get a genre of videos that I've never watched recommended to me?
A: Many viewers have told us that they don’t want to simply be shown the same kinds of things they have seen before and they look to YouTube to help them discover the great variety of content available. We aim to give each viewer a mix of familiar favorites, videos enjoyed by users with similar interests, and some serendipitous recommendations that help them discover something new.
Q: Why am I getting videos that I already watched multiple times suggested to me and will I be able to set it so videos I already watched are recommended to me less?
A: We currently don’t restrict recommendations to videos that haven’t been watched before because we’ve found that viewers often watch the same videos multiple times, and they seem to enjoy them! With that said, we continue to hear feedback from viewers, so we are actively exploring ways to make this better for those who don’t.
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Hello! I’m Victor and work on the recommendations team at YouTube.
As for getting better recommendations yourself, here are some tips you might try to help our systems understand what sorts of videos you actually enjoy. Also be sure that any third party extensions are turned off or whitelisted for YouTube, as they may interfere with your personalized recommendations.
Q: I find the algorithm pretty poor - it only recommends popular videos. It used to recommend me some nice obscure videos that were suited to my interests, now it's just trash.
A: We also get delighted when we are recommended an obscure video that we know we wouldn’t have found otherwise. While popularity is one of the many factors that influence recommendations, the goal of our recommendations is to help each individual viewer find videos they will enjoy, regardless of how popular they are. Every day, over 200 million different videos are recommended and seen by viewers who visit the YouTube homepage.
As for getting better recommendations yourself, here are some tips you might try to help our systems understand what sorts of videos you actually enjoy. Also be sure that any third party extensions are turned off or whitelisted for YouTube, as they may interfere with your personalized recommendations.
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Hi! I work on the recommendations team and I noticed several questions about the “Not Interested” feature:
Q: Why can’t we outright block entire channels from our recommended yet? I want to block out certain people ENTIRELY from my life but their content keeps popping up in my recommended. I constantly have to click “I’m not interested.”
If you click the 3-dot menu next to a video and select “Not interested” and then click the “Tell Us Why” link, you can select “Not interested in the channel”. After that, you should not see any videos from the channel recommended on Home or Up Next, although you will still be able to find them if you subscribe (in your subscriptions feed), search for them, or visit the channel page.
Q: After selecting "not interested" on several different videos from a channel I don't subscribe to, why does that channel pop up in my recommended? I don't like the channel and don't want recommendations for them.
Thanks for the feedback. This is an area we get a lot of questions about and are working to improve. While we do consider how many videos from a channel you’ve marked as “not interested”, we don’t have any hard rules that will stop all recommendations from a channel based on a certain number of marked videos. In order to prevent all videos from a channel from appearing in your recommendations, you need to tap the “Tell Us Why” after marking a video as “Not interested” and then select “Not interested in the channel”. We are exploring improvements to make this easier.
If this feature is not working for you, please send a report with the details via our Feedback tool.
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Hi everyone! I’m Amy, a Product Manager working on recommendations.
Q: What specific number threshold and/or percentages does youtube value/require for a video to be recommended more? IE: is audience retention more important or watch time? (A 15 minute video with 5 minutes of watch Time, 33% retention vs a 4 minute video with 3 minutes watch time 75% retention?) what should I be paying more attention to in my analytics to duplicate for further success?
A: There is no magic number that the audience is looking for when they choose a video, and similarly, there are no magic numbers of minutes or % our systems optimize for. More is better. As for the importance of absolute vs. relative watchtime, it varies by surface (e.g. Search, Home, Up Next, etc.) and changes over time. Our advice would be to find a good balance. Use your audience retention reports in YouTube Analytics, and if you see viewers are abandoning at a certain point, try to figure out what in your video might have led to that. And if most viewers are watching the whole way through your video, you probably have room to experiment with longer-form content.
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