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.
How is this different than any other technique to maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid format for newspaper articles? It's probably designed to draw people in and sell copies. Is that also "gaming the algorithm"?
Because it’s extraordinarily effective?
He made it to the top of YouTube with it. If it’s the exact same thing as other existing techniques how come others haven’t been able to match his success with those classic formulas?
If you’ve only read my summary then we are discussing this with completely different mental models of what he actually does.
They do not describe the same process everyone else uses to make content. They are much more specific than that.
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.
You seem to be of the belief that for anyone to be the most successful at this field they have to be gaming an algorithm. But perhaps there’s really no algorithm, or perhaps (my opinion) the algorithm is so good at showing people what they want that you can instead just focus on making videos people want.