Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same path eventually.
0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
I don't like coffee but I still might learn about the business since it's so big.
He’s just making videos people will click on and then watch.
It’s almost like he’s trying to make something people want. I’ve heard that before somewhere…
I find the lengths he has gone to in order to design his videos specifically for how YouTube works to be extremely impressive.
Given that, it’s pretty clear to me from the full PDF that MrBeast is “gaming” it to the best effect possible given no perfect information.
The thing he cares about is if YouTube is going to recommend his video for people to watch, even beyond his own subscribers.
He believes that the key to this recommendation mechanism is having a high AVD and AVP (defined on page 5). Given that he has the highest rated account on all of YouTube now I’m inclined to defer to his expertise.
These are metrics one might use even if there’s no algorithm, in fact historically they have. TV shows used to use Neilsen data for similar purposes long before there was YouTube. TV producers would measure audience dropoff and then use that to help writers write more gripping episodes.
Google’s hope with their search for decades was that their algorithm was ungameable and that the way to get your site to the top of any result was to make it the best. That’s why they made it a black box and changed it whenever SEO caught on and used it to push junk to the top.
That’s had mixed results on the web for sure but it’s probably worked much better with video because you can track these metrics in a way you can’t with text. Also with the web, the page you land on may make Google further money (with ad sense, inspiring more Googling, using a Google product directly, etc.) or it may not, they don’t always own the ad service at wherever you land when you click a search result link. They don’t have the pure financial incentive of just showing you what you want, something you want a little less might make them more money.
With YouTube they own it all. The more you watch YouTube the more they make. You’re only clicking ads to other YouTube videos.
Everybody on YouTube knows you want a compelling lead in to get the click over to your video, a hook to keep them watching, etc. He’s codifying what they all already know and do. He just is better at it.