- Did you know that YouTube's algorithm
changes two to 300 times every year?
Maybe Alex Meyers is right.
Basically, the algorithm is changing every day,
so all that how to grow your YouTube
channel advice is total B.S.
Just do what you want and hope for the best.
(techno music)
Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer,
and welcome to Video Creators.
This channel is all about helping you grow
your YouTube audience so you can spread a message
that reaches people and it changes their lives.
And to reach people, you kinda need the help
of YouTube's search and discovery systems
to really kinda come behind your videos and
put it in front of the people who want to see it.
But how do you do that when the
algorithm is changing constantly?
Should we, as creators, just give up?
Is it like pointless and hopeless to
try to keep up with all the changes?
I don't think so.
I think we just really need to align our
focus as creators with what YouTube's focus is
for the search and discovery systems,
and if we can do that, then they're more
favorable to surface our content.
I think it's important to remember Google's
overall goals with their search and discovery systems.
What are they trying to accomplish?
It gets boiled down to this.
They wanna surface the right video to
the right person at the right time.
In order to do that, YouTube is collecting over
80 billion data points from viewers
everyday across their platform.
They're constantly surfacing different videos,
different people, evaluating what does this person watch,
what do they not watch, if they do click and watch it,
how long to they watch it for.
Do we collect signals that appear it's
like they enjoyed the video that it was valuable
or that they didn't enjoy the video?
Did the viewer see a video and mark it as not interested?
YouTube is constantly experimenting on this platform.
In fact, at any given time they are running
about 1,000 different experiments.
And every single one of them is designed to see,
is there a better way that we can figure out what
video to surface to what surface and at what time?
They run these experiments across millions of
viewers and collect a ton of information about them.
They say most of them don't actually even make it out
into the wild, publicly available, across all of YouTube.
In fact, only about two to 300 of those experiments
actually make it through their rigorous review process
and then end up as a new feature or a new tool
or a new data point in their algorithms that
is working across all of YouTube.
Because by the time it gets to that point,
they are pretty darn certain that this is going
to have a positive impact on the platform as a whole.
Maybe not for every single individual user,
but for the platform as a whole, they're like,
by that point, (finger snap) this is good.
A lot of creators focus a tremendous amount
of time and energy on optimizing their tags
and getting all the perfect keywords in there
and just stuffing that with every possible
combination they can think of.
Or getting every keyword for their video
and just stuffing it into that title.
Yes, you should write titles that tease a story
and that pitch value and that are enticing,
but remember, YouTube's search and discovery system
is designed to surface content that people
respond well to, that people want to watch.
And so, you should also design metadata and
content that's designed for people,
like optimize your content for people, not for robots.
So this comes down to things like branding
and the aspects you incorporate into your brand
that make it easy for someone to quickly love
what you're doing, what you're all about,
and want to watch everything you do.
A great book that you should totally be reading
is called Primal Branding by Patrick Hanlon.
He looks at all the top brands that develop
cult-like followings and talks about what made it
easy for people to fall in love with this brand.
So I'll put a link to that down in the description below.
You should totally read that book.
This also means that you should absolutely be focusing
on the storytelling element of your content.
We've been talking about that a lot here on
Video Creators for the past several months.
Whenever there's an opportunity to wrap your
content in a story, you should do that.
A good story, this is a frame of reference,
is about a character who wants something,
overcomes conflict to get it,
and is transformed by that process.
We love stories where the character is different
at the end because of the struggle,
the conflict they had to go through.
Learning how to tell that story well in a variety
of contexts is far easier said than done.
I've been trying to learn that myself for
about two years now, but I really do firmly
believe that another two to three years from now,
the channels that are really growing and winning
on YouTube are the ones are the ones who have
figured out how to wrap whatever they're doing
around a good story that is meaningful to people.
Which is really why you need to start
developing that skill now because it
takes a long time to really do well.
I want you guys to go click on this video
you see right here and go watch it.
It is a video with YouTube search and discovery team.
I got a lot of this information from that video.
It's about the tests and the things that they're running.
So go check that out.
Subscribe here, and also subscribe over
in the Creator Insider channel.
You learn a ton over there, as well.
And I'll see you guys on Monday, bye.