Hey there Welcome to this series of videos about how YouTube Search & Discovery works.
Listen up because understanding how your videos get found can be super helpful to your channel's success.
Let's start with the algorithm.
YouTube is a popular place, with hundreds of hours of video uploaded each minute.
Since no team of people could ever keep up with watching all that we rely on a sophisticated algorithm to match each viewer to the videos they're most likely to watch and enjoy.
The algorithm is basically a real-time feedback loop that tailors videos to each viewer's different interests.
It does its best to show the right videos to the right viewer at the right time across the whole planet.
How do we do this? With data! For each video, we look at things like titles, thumbnails, descriptions and how other viewers seem to be enjoying it.
We also look at how much of the video they're watching if they're clicking "like" or "dislike", and how many people are commenting.
And for each unique viewer we look at things like what the person has watched in the past, how much time they spend watching, and what they don't watch.
Above all, the algorithm has two simple goals:
1) Help each viewer find the videos they want to watch, and
2) Get viewers to keep watching more of what they like Now, you might be asking yourself "OK, then how can I get the algorithm to like my videos?" It's pretty simple: get the audience to like your videos.
That's because the algorithm follows the audience.
If people love your videos, the algorithm will surface them to others.
But where will new audiences actually encounter these videos? In the next sections, we'll dive into six key areas where videos are often found.
And we'll start with YouTube Search.