Watch-hours obviously matter, but so do other things like "are the best up & coming creators using us?" The danger is the tendency to focus on boosting measurab

Watch-hours obviously matter, but so do other things like "are the best up & coming creators using us?" The danger is the tendency to focus on boosting measurable things at the expense of nonmeasurables. Often the nonmeasurables eventually show up as measurables, but after too long a time delay to fix mistakes. So you could alienate creators while juicing the current numbers, and find a few years later that all the good content has gone elsewhere. The above didn't happen at YouTube, but it's the sort of thing that can happen. An example of something that did happen: Facebook found that rage-bait political news created a lot of clicks, but led to people getting fed up and leaving the platform after a while. By the time that was reflected in the traffic stats, it was too late to get them back. But fed-upness wasn't something they could easily measure, so it got ignored.