How The YouTube Algorithm Works in 2024

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if you're not getting the success that you think that you should be getting on YouTube yet this is the video that you've been waiting for give us 15 minutes and it's going to change your YouTube life about a year ago we presented to you our model for the YouTube algorithm how the algorithm works and talked a little bit about how you could use that to your advantage today we want to dive into that deeper you see because over the last year as we've been helping other people with their channels and as we've been building out our own channels we've been looking at it through this lens and we just have some new things to share with you so that's what we're going to go into today this is a highlevel overview of how the majority of the YouTube algorithm Works guys there is so much that goes into the YouTube algorithm and this is just a piece of it we're going to break it down for you so that it's just easy enough to understand so that by the time you're done with this video you're going to walk away knowing what you need to do with your channel to just improve and actually get some success so let's walk through a little bit of what this means how it works Define find a few terms so that it's easy for you to follow first of all it looks like a Target really we've got three concentric circles and what this represents is just all of the topics on YouTube and really what we've got here is three rings mostly because we wanted to show that there's a separation from the outside to the inside you see here where we said Broad and specific this is about the topic of the video the broader the topic is the broader the appeal the less people have to know about the topic for your video to appeal to them or for it to even be relevant so this would be something like entertainment heavy channels fall way up here you don't have to be searching for anything specific to be interested in that video meanwhile down here we could be talking about how to change out the O2 sensor on a 1993 Mustang that's a pretty specific thing that somebody's looking for and so you have to know a lot about that topic before that video has any relevance at all okay something really quick that I want to say like so this is flat right we're looking at this this 2D model here but you really have to think of it as almost like a globe right this doesn't perfectly represent how topics are on YouTube because according to this there's only two adjacent topics to your topic specifically but we all know that's not true there are probably hundreds maybe even thousands of adjacent topics and so that's what these wedges are but each web represents kind of a topic we can get as broad or as granular as you want with a wedge and so that's where we can apply this model we can we can be pretty specific let me give you an example if I could say that the topic of our channel is off-roading and say that that's a wedge but realistically it's like well I have content about ATVs and I have content about dirt bikes and I have content about ebikes but also within my ATV content I have kind of more entertaining videos but I also have videos about how to do modifications and I have videos about financing in ATV and so we could put mods and financing and stuff we could make many wedges out of each of those don't overthink it it's not that big of a deal just look at the topic of your channel as kind of a wedge and just think about kind of how tight we're going to stay okay let's define a term here Channel lens all right so we're going to do blue marker yes so we're going to be drawing up some circles here on our little diagram and channel lens represents what you are shooting for with your channel what you think your channel is about what you think your videos are about everything that is your perception of your channel the next one is the audience profile we're going to use red this is what YouTube thinks your channel is about it's probably not going to match your channel lens and that's one of the problems that a lot of people are running into which is why their videos are not spreading we'll also use a couple of other markers to represent individual videos as well as individual people within an audience as we go through some of these examples as we talk about different sizes and types of channels this is all going to start to make a ton more sense I think it's time to get into it yeah let's do it so here is how it works let's say you have a brand new YouTube channel and you start putting out a couple of videos you have your topic we're going to say it's this one right here and you make your first video and it's about some aspect of your topic and it's maybe kind of a medium appeal topic it's not something that literally anybody on YouTube could watch and find it appealing but it's also not something like really specific like we talked about before and so maybe it falls around right here there's a specific video that you made the next video that you make is on the same topic the difference is that it's pretty specific it's a tutorial it's you know how to do something pretty specific within that Niche let's say it's topically very very close to the first one but it's down here the next video you make you think oh I want to do something a little bit maybe it could go viral so I'm going to stay on the exact same topic but this time I'm going to make a video that is just really entertaining I'm going to go all out on my cinematography and um it's going to be way out here very broad appeal your next video you're like well I've kind of exhausted that topic nobody's watching my videos yet cuz I've only made three so I'm going to stay on the same topic but I'm going to cover like something pretty different but it's within the same topic so it's way over here right and over time as you make more videos you're kind of doing this stuff now what's going on when your channel is brand new is YouTube has no idea who your audience is your channel lens what you're trying to create is this that's your whole Channel lens and it's pretty big it's probably too big and YouTube doesn't really know quite what's going on here and so what they do is with every video they're going to try they're going to experiment with people based on the topic based on the kind of videos that other people watch and and so when they find videos that seem kind of similar to yours they're going to try to show your videos to the people that watch those other videos that are similar to yours but they're going to do it pretty conservatively they're not going to want to like show show it to everybody that watches those other videos because they just don't know how it's going to do you made this video you know this person watches it cool now this same person they also watch a video right here and they watch another video right here and maybe one right here different channels all different topics well that's cool that person likes all those other different things so maybe YouTube says well let's try that video on another person that also watched this video and they do and that person doesn't click on it so they say okay well we'll try it one more time and they do to another person that watches that same video and they also don't click on it they're like okay well there's not a correlation between that video and this video maybe let's try it with that one you can see where I'm going here there's a lot of experimentation that happens for YouTube to figure out what your channel is about and if they start to have success with one of your videos and it starts to get viewed by people they're going to start to finally figure out what an audience profile should look like but they're not going to have that kind of success with all of your videos so you've got this big Channel lens but YouTube's like H I think the channel the channel audience profile is that that's what it should be people who regularly watch videos that correlate well with that little segment that's who we're going to show it to okay this right here is why small creators think that YouTube hates them yeah uh we as small creators like when we're just starting a YouTube channel like all of these dots representing videos we only have two three maybe 10 videos out there and they're probably a little bit all over the place well YouTube just has to do their best to figure out who your audience is and they're going to start small and so so many of the videos you create as a small Creator will just fall outside of what YouTube thinks your audience profile is and so it's not that YouTube hates you it's just like what Ricky said they're testing very conservatively and they're starting small and so what do you do to overcome this you really just keep publishing but you want to stay kind kind of centered you want to stay kind of focused on some of these topics that you originally created on um and we've actually seen some really cool recent success with this absolutely so I've been working on brand new channel for my project double time if you don't know what I'm talking about we've got some other videos that talk about this but on a brand new Channel that I haven't told you what it is um yet and I will eventually I published 30 videos in 30 days and it was a ton of work but it was really cool for the first few days basically Nothing YouTube showed my videos to a few different people and that was it and I tried a few things I I did a few shorts and stuff because those tend to YouTube will experiment a little faster with those but nothing massive but then I started to have a video that got a little bit more traction and YouTube was like ah here's one and they got some data around that video and they figured out here no well maybe here's an audience profile so when the next video came out they're like okay well let's tested on those people and every subsequent video started to get viewed by more and more people and as that happened s i they get more data I didn't go all over the place my videos are more like that much closer together right and so they try the next video with that that audience and they're like oh well that worked maybe the audience profiles a little bit more like that and then the next video goes out and they're like oh maybe it's a little bit more like that and it keeps expanding the audience profile and the more that audience profile expands the more success I'm going to have with all of these videos I made on my channel so advice number one for a new channel or a small Channel you might have been doing this for a long time but not found the success you want it's to Define your channel lens don't just do whatever and end up with the channel lens that just happens to happen based on the content that you make that's why some creators literally take years and you like you may be in that boat it's because if you just go all over the place YouTube takes a long time to figure it out but if you stay focused on a smaller portion of your topic YouTube was going to figure out so much faster if you say my channel lens is going to be I'm going to cross topics a little bit but here's my channel lens then when you make that video this brown one that's kind of in the middle of that lens and it doesn't do that well okay that's fine well I'll try one here and I'll try one here and finally one of these takes off right and YouTube gets people watching it and so you're starting to get views on this one lots of persons watching your video here right that's awesome well now yoube is like awesome now we have an understanding of what this channel is about and they build this little audience profile here that over time will start to fill more of your channel lens the thing is that over time you may end up with a with an audience profile that doesn't quite match what you think it's supposed to be this is one of the big explanations for why sometimes you create a video that you think is a perfect fit like awesome well I'm going to make this video right here that's outside of the audience profile YouTube has for you and so YouTube doesn't know who to show it to it tries it with your normal audience and some of your audience see this part word overlaps like a vend diagram part of your audience really liked it but there's this big part of who your audiences that maybe you didn't even realize was part of your audience that they don't have any interest in that video so they don't watch it and it doesn't spread as far so the better that you can Define your channel lens and grow the audience profile to fill your whole lens and expand beyond that that's what's going to help make more and more of your videos more successful all right in last year's video one of the big questions we got in the comments was what about viral videos there are a lot of small creators who work for month after month maybe year after year and they don't have very many successful videos but they'll have one just take off what about that cuz I think that this is really cool but I would be interested to see like maybe we could show them how does that apply you have this channel maybe your channel lens isn't very well defined so you do make this video video way out here and let's say that YouTube guesses right they show it to somebody they really liked it they show it to the next person they really liked it the algorithms do their thing and suddenly this video just blows up and you're just getting millions and millions and millions of little X's right people individual people watching that video well now YouTube says okay if we look at all the views across this channel they're very heavily weighted toward that video so they say well okay here's the audience profile the problem is that all the rest of the videos on your channel are here and so now if any of these people that watched your viral video go check out your channel before subscribing they're like oh well none of the rest of this is really for me cuz I don't really care about 93 Mustangs uh I don't have one of those but that cool racing video that was awesome see see that how how different those are like very broad appeal very specific and even some of these okay maybe I'll stick around and watch some of those that person who checks out the channel they probably just don't even subscribe the people who do subscribe from watching the viral video cuz they're like that was awesome they subscribe but they don't watch your other content and so the audience profile stays right here and you end up with a bunch of dead subscribers subscribers who don't watch your other content and so when you publish your next video and that next video is Somewhere In Here YouTube tries to show it to all these people and those people don't care so that video just dies in fact we have seen over and over and over and over and over again from people that they have one video go vir Al and their Channel just plateaus also it's hard to replicate that because I drew that Circle a little bit wrong YouTube knows that that video went really well but they don't know really who the audience profile is so it might end up actually being this and so when you make your next viral video and you make it right here YouTube's not showing it to the right people having a video go viral when your channel is not intended to be that type of channel can actually do a lot more harm than good and this is why it's because now you've just confused the YouTube algorithm and I think it's important to make the distinction between a viral video and one that just does exceptionally well for your channel um and maybe we can erase and then show that because I think it's important to know like when you do a viral video like you said it's going to confuse the algorithm your audience profile is going to be messed up and then your videos aren't going to be shown as you continue to create but with a video that just does exceptionally well it's still close enough to your other videos that your videos in the future will continue to do well and I think it's really important to frame as we talk through all of these different scenarios it's important to know what growth and success actually is and like a successful video or an unsuccessful video like what does that mean yeah if you're a channel and your Baseline views are 500 per video then a successful video would be like 600 views baseline or maybe 700 like it doesn't have to be huge you don't have to get a 10,000 view video for it to be successful generally speaking I think success is just growth in an upward Direction day over day week over week month over month you're getting more views than you did before yeah and one thing we need to keep in mind is that the YouTube algorithm is generally going to make it stay that way so here's what I mean by that on a channel that we started a few years ago we had several videos that we published that they did well in the beginning but well for again a brand new channel we're talking about hundreds of views in the first month maybe some of those videos today on that channel the channel that's been around for over a few years now that has videos with millions of views on it the top 20 videos on that channel at least half of them were were made in the first 6 months of that Channel's existence so you can make a video that has the potential to do incredibly well like hundreds of thousands or millions of views and you can put it on a brand new channel and it won't do that well in the very beginning until YouTube figures out the audience those videos as long as the content is Evergreen meaning it's still relevant later YouTube will continue to promote that video over time and many of those videos now have hundreds of thousands or millions of views on them videos that were some of the very first we're talking like the first 5 to 10 videos on that channel okay now just a minute ago I said that we would show an example of what what just a very good video for your channel looks like that's not necessarily explosive or viral so maybe let's show that really quick and then there's something that we really need to talk about and it's been on the board the whole time and before we move on to other sites of channels we need to kind of give it a little bit of air time so first of all in order for video to be really successful the channel lens isn't what determines the success the channel lens is where you're focusing your energy but what determines whether or not a video succeeds is whether or not your video fits an audience profile that YouTube understands and that audience profile has an audience like there's enough people on YouTube who fit your audience profile which is why we want to grow the audience profile over time so if there's your audience profile looks like this right now and you make a video that does well it fits within that audience profile it's going to tend to spread more so what that looks like is people watch this video and some of those people are the same people that watch this video on this other channel and this video on this other channel and this video on this other channel we touched on this a little bit earlier but it turns out that this is person number one person number two that watches this video also watches this video or ones very similar to it ones that YouTube has found correlate to it they don't watch this one but they watch ones like this and then there's a third person that watches this video and this one and this video over here and maybe this video here you see what's going on YouTube is figuring out what other videos on YouTube correlate to yours and if this channel is already more established and has a bigger audience then YouTube can take the audience profiles from these videos and it can start showing those people your video and use that to grow your audience profile profile that is what happens when we get a successful video is it takes your audience profile makes it bigger and gives YouTube substantially more data to work with so every video going forward does better yeah we talk a lot in the office some of the language us is like you have a base hit video right it just does it performs well with YouTube's understanding of what your audience is and then since that happened YouTube starts to identify these other audiences that it works well with okay but once again we need to come back to this this is one of I think the best tools for channels who were struggling this is one that we did not talk about at all last year and I think that this is so big for small channels uh we've seen it time and time again when YouTube is struggling to identify who your audience is this can be the key to unlock or to at least help YouTube get a head start on that process we talked about in the very beginning YouTube is having to experiment and they're doing it conservatively and when we say that we're talking about the majority of the YouTube algorithms they have several we're talking about the suggested videos the up next the all of those recommendations the homepage all of that videos on new channels they're going to show up just pretty conservatively with search YouTube's just trying to find the video that seems to be the best fit for what somebody typed into search and YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the planet and YouTube V videos regularly show up in the number one biggest search engine on the planet Google so when we make a video that directly also answers something that people are likely to search on the internet our videos get shown no matter how small our channel is whenever you see a channel that's got a video with 300,000 views but like a th000 subscribers sometimes it's because they made a viral video but sometimes you look at that and say there's no way that video went viral it's because they made a video that answers a question that a lot of people have and so search can make it really easy for you to pair your content to an audience that's looking for that kind of information and it gives YouTube quicker earlier data so that's why search can be so powerful we'll have to make make more content we talk about this a lot in Project 24 we'll have to make more content about how you can actively use search to be able to feed this information to YouTube and get early views to your channel I think it's also important to realize like there's a lot of people on YouTube who say that search is just not that great of a way to grow an audience and that may be true as you get bigger but the reality is even though search makes up a small percentage of overall views on YouTube as a small Creator it is one of the best ways to be shown when you make a brand new website getting your content to show up on search on Google can take months on YouTube even on a brand new channel it can be up within a day actually ranking for specific Search terms the it's the high level overview of how we can succeed on search Okay so we're going to jump into not just brand new channels we're going to talk a little bit about large channels those big viral channels those really heavy entertainment channels that we see a lot but before we do we need to address what I would consider to be an elephant in the room yeah and that is that the YouTube algorithm is not just bed based on video topics and how broad or specific they are like broad appeal versus specific that's a piece of it but there's so many other things at play that impact I would almost say like your slice or your wedge yeah and a lot some of those we address here in our factors there are many many channels on YouTube that cover similar topics but they just have a completely different feel to them some of them like they just appeal to very different audiences you would almost consider them different wedges even though they're on the same topic so tone and personality are huge factors likewise you can be in a great topic that there's a huge audience that wants that kind of information but your titles aren't very engaging your thumbnails aren't very eye-catching so people don't click on them and when YouTube does Show your videos nobody's really engaging with them they don't watch very long or they don't click the like button or they don't comment if your numbers are lower than they should be for your topic it's not going to do that well I'm I have tags listed here tags is one that some people ask about and YouTube specifically says they use tags to correct spelling in their Auto like Auto caption if you look in the Google Doc or yeah in the support document we don't use these for SEO for helping YouTube know what your video is about YouTube's already transcribing and indexing all of the information from your video but the way that people engage with it if people don't click on your video chances are the title and thumbnail were off base um if people don't continue watching chances are that your pace was not right the tone the personality there's a lot of those other factors okay before we move on I just have to say like guys this stuff is so important this could literally be what's holding your channel back not completely understanding this could literally be keeping you from getting the views that your videos most likely are so close to deserving so there's a couple things that it could like you need to identify is this an audience issue like all these things that we've mentioned all these different scenarios we've given are is that where you're struggling or are you struggling with some of these other factors are your titles and thumbnails just a little off base are you struggling to get that engagement is your tone you know maybe you're you're thinking you're going for one audience but your tone is really telling YouTube it's another audience guys just take this stuff to Heart figure out what it is for you on your channel I know that we've covered a lot here and it could seem a little overwhelming but honestly all of these factors are really important but there's probably just a few that you might be missing and really the easy way to tell if it's this or this if YouTube isn't even really showing your videos to very many people still you've published a bunch first of all if you haven't published like at least 20 videos you probably just need to keep publishing you don't have enough data neither does YouTube to figure out what's going on yet chances are you just it's you just got to keep growing if you've published a lot more than that though and your videos are just not getting very many Impressions it's you know your clickthrough rate looks fine just YouTube just won't show my videos because they hate small creators if that's the feeling that you're having chances are your issue is here it's not clear to YouTube who your audience is and so as they and maybe you've you've created a channel lends that's too broad or maybe you've created one that's too small and so really the audience profile for your channel lens is appropriate because you've just pigeon hold yourself into something tiny so consider that on the other end of the spectrum if you're getting plenty of Impressions but your click-through rates are really low title and thumbnail if you're getting a perfectly fine clickthrough rate and YouTube's showing your videos a bit there's a good chance that there's an issue here with engagement people aren't watching enough of the video and the reason they're not watching enough or they're not liking and commenting and subscribing and all that stuff could be tone could be personality could be pacing could be all of those other factors that we all talk about on these YouTube channels all the time that's really what the rest of this is about if you figure out where the problem is then we can start to address how to fix it all right guys let's talk about some bigger channels now I think this model is really helpful for small creators but also for large creators alike like even when as we were using this model to talk about viral channels huge viral channels it all still made a ton of sense yeah the there's a lot of times we'll get the question does this really apply to like really big viral entertainment channels because they don't even really have a topic a lot of the time you know Mr Beast makes videos you know with challenges about staying in a car or uh he makes videos where he's running from the FBI when you talk about like what the challenge is about it's like his channel is not about cars his Channel's about challenges that's what it is that's the topic and so you might think that he's all over the board here but he's not he's got a reasonably narrow band and he sticks to it side note he says it took him years of publishing on YouTube before he really figured it out that's perfectly normal a lot of people just want their first video to go viral and they say and they put everything into that first video and sometimes it happens it's just really really really uncommon Mark Rober I would say the same thing I really love Mark's videos I love his channel my kids watch him we just have a great time with him Mark's channel is not about squirrels and it's not about Glitter it's not even a pranks channel it's a Channel about engineering cool stuff to solve a problem now he's made videos in the past about like the size of the solar system and that doesn't quite seem to fit and that video did pretty well cuz it was pretty cool but notice that's not the videos he makes now that was one of his earlier videos it's done well over time but once he like really set in with like the glitter bomb and stuff and with his mechanical engineering background that's like his happy place he's just gone all in on that and it does incredibly well so what does this look like for viral channels big channels it looks very similar except they make their videos close together each one's slightly different right but they're all close together they have a channel lens that is tight right it makes it really obvious to YouTube what they're doing so but each one is has unique value it makes it really clear to YouTube who the audience profile is and the thing is this audience profile May doesn't look huge but really the number of people in that circle is enormous because the appeal is so broad the reason this is drawn as a circle is that the further out you go The Wider it gets in any topic uh and that's why it's just it's such a big audience profile such a big circle it's because the appeal is so widespread YouTube knows who the audience is right and at this point for Mr Beast really the audience is all YouTube it's like he's going to show up on you know everybody's homepage all the recommend because YouTube knows that his his videos while they are very specific they are wide appeal and and nearly everyone will watch them that's the only difference they're doing the same thing they're just further out here that is not the ideal channel for everyone it's what some of these people have chosen to do and it's working well for them and there's a lot of money to be made on channels that are all the way on in the inside Circle as well as anywhere in the middle so you just need to pick where you want to be Define what your channel lens is going to look like like and make videos within that lens so that YouTube knows who you're trying to Target and can pair you up with the right people I think what you just said is one of the coolest things because over probably the past 10 years everybody who doesn't know much about YouTube probably not you guys watching but anyone who doesn't know much about YouTube thinks you have to be this to make money on YouTube but the reality is you can be a Creator here and have much more specific you know interest or audience and still do so well and I think that that's one of the like maybe the cool secrets about YouTube you know it's getting wider more people understand now but it's still awesome how successful you can be even with a smaller Channel just pick your channel ends it doesn't really matter where it is as long as you can help YouTube understand what it is and grow an audience profile that fits it
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Channel: Channel Makers
Views: 30,456
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: channel makers, make money on youtube, channel makers make money
Id: OCgJpp3qFAE
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 29min 17sec (1757 seconds)
Published: Mon Oct 02 2023
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