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OK.. In a sense, I am overstating. Having an anti-spam team is obviously a recognition that SEO/Spam exists and that Google is trying to discourage or mitigate

OK.. In a sense, I am overstating. Having an anti-spam team is obviously a recognition that SEO/Spam exists and that Google is trying to discourage or mitigate. But Google is well beyond just attracting spam. Success in Google search rankings is, for many sites, the better part of online success. If Google ranks needlessly wordy recipes more highly than concise & useful recipes... then wordy recipes get written. It's not about ranking recipes anymore... it's about the effects google has on recipes. The recipes get written in a wordy fashion, because of the ranking system... not just ranked because of the writing style. Google is dictating the nature of online recipes with their rankings. A few years back, Google made changes to youtube's recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent, regular videos. Viral hits became much less common. The result has been to send many professional youtubers into a frantic grind. There's no point in taking time with a video, or trying weird ideas. It won't go viral anyway. A week off or a couple of flops is harshly punished. There are tens of thousands of these youtubers, basically small businesses. There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects. It's always communicated as it is here. I believe this is how Google execs actually think about the issues. As a quasi-spam problem to be mitigated with the next “helpful content update.”

jasode 4y ago
>There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects. Can you articulate what concrete actions Google could take that would address these 2nd order effects? >, Google made changes to youtube's recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent, regular videos. [...] A week off or a couple of flops is harshly punished. I've seen this repeated many times (especially from Youtubers making videos about "burnout") but the analysis about cause & effect seems incomplete. As one counterpoint, Ben Krasnow "Applied Science" channel slowed down from weekly uploads to a video every few months and yet his views and subscribers went up not down: https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos Another yt channel that had a year between uploads and the views went up : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX7katl3DVmch4D7LSvqbVQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX7katl3DVmch4D7LSvqbVQ/vid... My pet theory on the contradictory anecdotes: the Youtubers making videos on a topic with lots of competition from other Youtubers uploading every week -- such as fast fashion clothes shopping -- are the ones that seem to suffer if they slow down. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zara+haul https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zara+haul However, if you're making videos in niche topics with originality (maybe "weird ideas" as you put it), you won't be penalized by infrequent uploads. Many examples including Technology Connections, Applied Science, etc So a different conclusion can be reached... if one makes a high quality videos, one can even upload just once a year and the Youtube algorithm won't penalize you.
- michaelt 4y ago
  I suspect some of the contradiction comes from whether you're measuring views per video or ad revenue per month. If one youtuber produced a 32-minute video per month and got 500,000 views while another produced eight 4-minute videos per month and averaged 200,000 views per video, who do you suppose gets the most ad money? I'd wager the latter.

jasode 4y ago

>There's never any reckoning with 2nd order effects. Can you articulate what concrete actions Google could take that would address these 2nd order effects? >, Google made changes to youtube's recommendation engine in a way that really "encourages" frequent, regular videos. [...] A week off or a couple of flops is harshly punished. I've seen this repeated many times (especially from Youtubers making videos about "burnout") but the analysis about cause & effect seems incomplete. As one counterpoint, Ben Krasnow "Applied Science" channel slowed down from weekly uploads to a video every few months and yet his views and subscribers went up not down: https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos Another yt channel that had a year between uploads and the views went up : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX7katl3DVmch4D7LSvqbVQ/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX7katl3DVmch4D7LSvqbVQ/vid... My pet theory on the contradictory anecdotes: the Youtubers making videos on a topic with lots of competition from other Youtubers uploading every week -- such as fast fashion clothes shopping -- are the ones that seem to suffer if they slow down. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zara+haul https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zara+haul However, if you're making videos in niche topics with originality (maybe "weird ideas" as you put it), you won't be penalized by infrequent uploads. Many examples including Technology Connections, Applied Science, etc So a different conclusion can be reached... if one makes a high quality videos, one can even upload just once a year and the Youtube algorithm won't penalize you.

michaelt 4y ago
I suspect some of the contradiction comes from whether you're measuring views per video or ad revenue per month. If one youtuber produced a 32-minute video per month and got 500,000 views while another produced eight 4-minute videos per month and averaged 200,000 views per video, who do you suppose gets the most ad money? I'd wager the latter.