How exactly does the YouTube algorithm work?
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Exactly how it works is not something Youtube is keen on letting everyone know. If exactly how it works was widely known, everyone looking to maximize their video’s viewership would game the system perfectly to get the most views.
But we do know a few things
* Youtube has admitted to using AI, which would mean they don’t even know how the algorithm works. It is neigh impossible to trace what made a neural network decide a video should be shown to you, just like it’s next to impossible to show how AI knows your face apart from a very similar person. Could you put a finger on what sets apart your friends face from someone with very similar facial features? Probably not. You just look at them and instantly recognize it is them.
* Youtube wants to maximize engagement. That’s what it tells it’s AI to select for. If sending a certain video to a person displaying a given behavior results in that person spending more time on youtube, then it’ll reinforce that action. If it results in that person leaving the site, it may be less likely to suggest such videos in the future.
* Youtube wants to maximize ad revenue. This means the algorithm is incentivized to show ads only on videos that are likely to be ad friendly. They could hire people to do this, but that’s impractical when millions of videos are uploaded every day. Instead they have a group of people flagging a select group of videos as ad friendly or unfriendly, then the AI tries to gleen from that sample data if videos never manually watched by a youtube employee are ad friendly. This can result in mixups. Most famously, LGTBQ videos were flagged as ad unfreindly. Most likely because the AI made the association that LGTBQ videos often talked about sex which wasn’t ad friendly, so it flagged most LGTBQ videos as ad unfriendly even when they didn’t talk about sex.
[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo) should give you an idea about how AIs could be trained. It probably isn’t the exact method Youtube uses, but it should inform you how they could be trained and why even the creators don’t know exactly why they make decisions they make.
Might as well ask for the keys to Fort Knox. It is a very closely guarded secret. Possibly, with the amount of AI in it, not even the people in Youtube would be very sure how some of their systems makes the decisions it does. In the most general terms it searches for patterns (which very likely only the AI understands) of clicks, subscriptions and views and uses those patterns to select and recommend videos and ads.
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