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Is A/B testing focused on increasing the time people spend on YouTube or the actual benefits people get out of YouTube? A/B testing tends not to produce the re
by ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Is A/B testing focused on increasing the time people spend on YouTube or the actual benefits people get out of YouTube?
A/B testing tends not to produce the result you want when the metrics you are going for are harmful.
- mgraczyk 6y agoI don't work at Youtube, but different teams probably optimize for different things. Time spent is really, really hard to change directly, so they probably focus on things like p(like), p(watch > X% of vid), p(watches another video). Generally speaking there's no answer in principle to the question "is the time spent actually valuable". For the vast majority of people, time spent on Youtube cuts into time spent doing basically the same thing somewhere else. We're not all researching cures for AIDS or new sources of green energy. Most people just want to sit around being entertained.