I assume YouTube's core metric is watch time and so building features that reduce watch time is a no go. Not really related, but I thought of this. I used to w

I assume YouTube's core metric is watch time and so building features that reduce watch time is a no go. Not really related, but I thought of this. I used to work on a popular search engine. Our main metric started out as number of searches and number of results clicked on. That made sense as we were working on increasing the number of relevant results. Eventually we had to pivot the opposite direction because we wanted people to find the best result the fastest, which means less searches and less clicks on results. Kind of interesting how a core metric can flip like that. I could see YouTube potentially making lower watch time a goal if they make the experience of finding useful information so slow that people go elsewhere.