oh sorry i'm late i always have to guess when these videos start
in this video i'm gonna tell you how exactly tick tock is becoming king of content due to
its specific algorithm i'm gonna tell it to you from a data scientist point of view and then
i'm gonna tell you how youtube and tick tock are fundamentally different
and the galactic wars that are about to be waged in the content space will be epic will involve you
whether you're a creator or a watcher and if you want to stay until the end you're going to learn
a ton by the end of this video i'm going to help you answer questions like if i'm a small creator
do i start on youtube or tic talk or if i'm a tic talker already do i move to youtube or if i'm a
youtuber already do i move to tik tok and how do i smash the like button and the subscribe button
if i'm new because that is going to help me keep up and stay up to date and help you productively
become a high functioning high paid member of society wink and with that we're starting right
now
the date middle of december 2020 about 165 days ago i started posting on youtube on father's day
of 2020. i have now accrued over 69 don't laugh i have now accrued over 69 videos and
i still have not blown up on youtube although i do have a healthy 1.5 000 subscribers so
thanks to each and every one of you however what is happening in this tiki taki website
i posted my first tech talk in august it's only gotten 100 views i posted my second
tick tock in august it's gotten 200 views and i posted my third tick tock in october to 300 views
my fourth tick tock a 15 second blurry video where i take off my mask in the garage and i tell you 10
seconds of information about what an interviewer expects from you during an interview and that's
gotten 30 000 views basically due to this video alone i've gotten over 400 followers and
1200 likes so why did it happen so quickly on tick tock what's the difference between tick-tock
and youtube's algorithm can a data scientist explain how tick-tock and youtube's algorithms
are different the way this video is going to be broken up is i'm going to talk about the
algorithm specifically then i'm going to talk about what the pros and cons are of each of
the two algorithms and then i'm going to talk to you about how it's possible for a video to
blow up so much quicker on tick tock especially since there is a lot less work to be done here
it took me 90 percent more work to get situated on youtube i needed to find an appropriate name
i needed to make channel art which involves a lot of hours on photoshop i needed to be able
to understand how to edit the videos perfectly in premiere i needed to get a proper camera i needed
to get a proper mic i needed to find the time to quietly record within the confines of living in
three thousand dollar four thousand dollar rent in the bay area all of these constraints aside
it still takes almost five to six hours per video even though i've gotten it so streamlined
but a tick tock on the other hand can really only take the 15 seconds that the content goes into it
whatever you take away from this video i want you to remember that if you have knowledge to spare
if you have enough to build an entire youtube channel out of and you're not on tiktok quite
yet go into the space it is fully unsaturated for you to be able to put out your knowledge
into it so that you can start really leveraging how much time you can put into your content and
reap the fruits of being able to claim unclaimed territory the youtube algorithm is a recommender
system it takes in many different features which is also known as measurements or metrics or
whatever you want to call them things that you can measure when you interact with the youtube space
however there's only two features that actually really matter retention and click-through rate
retention is how long a user stays on the platform so if you're a new youtuber or you're an
old youtuber it's all the same very meritocratic you need to be creating content that takes a user
and then lets them watch as much of the video as possible whatever amount of the video they watch
over the total video length that is the percentage which we call retention the second and arguably
more important factor that leads to retention and leads to the number of views a video gets
and leads to everything else such as liking and commenting is click-through rate when youtube
shows a youtube video thumbnail to a user on youtube then that is counted as an impression
so every time you see a new thumbnail or perhaps even an old thumbnail the second or third time
that counts as you getting impressed by the thumbnail you have now increased the
denominator for the click-through rate metric but the only way to increase the numerator of
the click-through rate is to then click it this is tricky because at all times you're looking at
over 10 impressions when you are scrolling through your youtube feed when your youtube search and
your youtube homepage this leads us to what is a healthy click-through rate well since there's over
10 videos shown and pressed on a viewer at one time then it'll be really hard to have a video
with a click-through rate of higher than 10 percent consistently because in a world where
all thumbnails are equally appealing then your video has a 1 in 10 chance of getting clicked
but that's not always the case if you take away something from this video a golden standard for
how a video can go viral on youtube is having a 10 to 20 minute length having a greater than 50
percent retention and holding a greater than 10 ctr click-through rate this passes certain
thresholds for youtube youtube needs to look at the two metrics that i talked about click-through
rate and retention and then try to decide whether or not it's comfortable taking the risk to push
your content to a new person that's never seen it before that's why on your recommendation side
whenever you see any video on youtube you start seeing videos that really are kind of enticing
kind of clickbaity kind of question asking you want to know what happens when you click that
video even though it has nothing to do with your previous search history however more likely you're
having recommended videos that have a lot to do with your previous watch and search history that
is how a recommender system works it is looking at your behavior and trying to see which other users
you actually behave very similar to because it is trying to map you to a human archetype assuming
that humans really only follow specific set paths like we're all player pianos or hosts from
hbo's west world this ends up being pretty accurate because we need to also estimate what
your lifetime value is we need to see how much money you're gonna make youtube overall through
the course of your time on youtube and by time i mean all the time you will ever spend from the
first time you install it to the last time you'll ever see a youtube video and you know what that
means the way you generate revenue for youtube is by watching ads it's one of the most important if
not the only way that youtube generates revenue from you as a user the youtuber has a couple of
different ways to generate more revenue and i can cover that in a future video about how i
was able to make thousands without being monetized on youtube yet that's for a different day now that
you have an intimate understanding of how the youtube algorithm works let me cover tick-tock
tick-tock is going to be fairly different from the outset there's music involved or also called
sounds on the platform you can make your own original sound by just recording a video just like
the predecessors to tick-tock otherwise known as musically before tick-tocks there were vines and
other short form content after tick-tock there are instagram reels and now youtube shorts you notice
that there's a trend short content has an upper hand because it takes less time to watch them
imagine the opposite side of the content consuming landscape imagine netflix when you make choice
cycle today you might binge four episodes of the office well netflix now knows you definitely like
the office and it doesn't know a lot more about you so they can't push new content because it's
too risky you're just the guy that likes the office on youtube it's very similar if you
watch four 10-minute videos and then call it a day youtube only has those four 10-minute
videos now obviously you watch more content within the same amount of time on youtube because those
videos are shorter but what if they were super duper short and what if they got to the point
so fast basically in 15 seconds or 60 seconds that you can then immediately binge another because
just by swiping you suddenly get to see something else entirely new that is the crux of how tick
tock's algorithm becomes king it still cares about retention and click-through rate but since you are
mostly swiping through and seeing a feed of videos one by one then retention is much more important
because if you bounce as a view by which i mean if you swipe into a video and then immediately swipe
off or maybe within the first two to three seconds that means that that video isn't for you
and the recommended system updates immediately on youtube if you watch a video that wasn't
suited for you you might end up just leaving the platform entirely because youtube doesn't
automatically play something else by you swiping one direction or another direction
no matter how you slice it youtube is still about feeling comfy feeling like you need an intro to
your videos feeling like you need to have a set have dogs and stuff tick tocks are just right in
your face you can take it any time and the more like you feel like you're right there with the
person and the cheaper the quality of the video oftentimes becomes more like the video is meant
for you it was bespoke it was something that was made on the fly and has the most authentic content
but the core of tiktok's algorithm is something specific to the recommender system it is able to
have a myriad extra features because of the music the sounds the sounds have different genres that
could have synergy with each other the sounds can connect different content types when you search
by sound instead of buy content someone who likes gardening youtube might end up finding
mushroom youtube but someone who likes lawyering youtube would never find mushroom youtube however
on tiktok it's just a swipe away because anyone can use any sound that's existed in the past and
a viral song by doja could actually be the bridge between understanding the difference between a 15
year loan and a 30 year alone and padding on mushrooms in the middle of the woods those two
genres would be entirely incompatible on youtube and forget about netflix it would be too risky
to try to bridge those two user groups however sounds becomes a meritocratic playing field for
everyone to be able to show off their content you see when people go on tick-tock and see content
that they don't like or they didn't sign up for it from a new user someone who's trying to grow
tick-tock didn't actually suffer from that total session time doesn't decrease because the user
just shows their dissatisfaction by swiping away by going to another video and there they go tiktok
can even change how frequently they show risky content by seeing how often the user swipes away
if they start swiping away too often you don't want to lose them tick tock reel them back in with
some bona fide good content that you know that they'll like so there's the rub while youtube has
the power of google behind it and becomes a search engine for understanding and learning things
in a visual way ticks off becomes the ultimate entertainment content for media that you didn't
even know you wanted to learn grow communicate and collaborate with people online from entirely
different genres opens up your mind really might not be able to teach you as much as youtube but
definitely doesn't waste your time or depending on how you think about it it can end up wasting hours
and days of your time if you want me to go into more detail about recommender systems or even the
intricacies of the machine learning elements i'd be happy to do so from a data scientist point of
view but today i hope you have a pretty technical understanding of how the algorithms and youtube
and tech talk work so what did i do to this video to get it viral did i plug it with a bunch of
hidden keywords did i make sure to get the perfect sound no honestly this video took maybe less than
five ten minutes and i'm going to show it to you right now sony interviewer says you have to give
a salary expectation what do you say this is a common interviewer trick they're trying to lowball
you by saving 10 to 15 and not on geico if you want more helpful tips on what to say misdirect
them follow me for more you're done you're done oh almost 15 seconds that's right hold on
cool so did you like it was it high quality enough for you well i know for a fact that that kind of
video would definitely fail on youtube low quality sound low quality editing and most importantly
youtube has a dislike function and since i didn't answer the questions in the video itself
this video would get blammed to heck in the algorithm when a bunch of people dislike it
just like how a bunch of angry comments ended up flooding in the tick tock however sentiment
does not matter when it comes to tick tock you can only heart and add to the engagement
of a video for better or worse this kind of content that asks an intriguing question about
a relatable topic and then offers to give you the answer for a follow ends up thriving on tick-tock
if you're curious i did end up making a part two so if you wanted to know what you actually
say when an interviewer asks you that question go ahead and check out my tick tock andrew mo money
as part of the 30 day challenge i've been creating a single video on youtube every single day in the
month of december uh leading up to my birthday and beyond into christmas into jesus's birthday
uh but the main point of that endeavor is so that we can see some growth on the channel
people can start finding consistency in my upload schedule and be confident that they
will start seeing similar trends and see me experiment and try to draw in new audiences
that is also 30 additional chances to try to go viral not happen yet but maybe it's this video
maybe it's the next one who knows each of these videos still takes five ish hours of my time and
my compass time helping me edit and put all these videos together so that's two people's times and
professor meatball's time to be able to bring content to you guys this is kind of a raw deal
because youtube is still going to suppress these contents based on the recommender system based on
how similar a user who likes personal finance and also likes data science is to a user who
voraciously goes down the youtube rabbit hole hopefully i'm covering enough audiences that
i don't alienate too many people but also draw in both sides of the audience at the same time i do a
trivia question at the end of each of these videos and today is no exception i'm going to ask you an
old favorite of mine this is not going to help you through interviews but it's just so darn fun
if a plane crashes between california and nevada where do you have to legally bury the survivors
if you know the answer put in the comments below i'll jumble up the answers and i'll
pick a winner to get a free consultation from me on data science or whatever you want it to
be on as always if you had a brand you wanted me to plug in one of these videos then go ahead and
screenshot this video put it on your instagram stories tag me and remo money and i will give
you a shot to be featured in a future video as in the art of war sun tzu said always look behind you
and as always for now but not for forever i'll see you guys next time peace
sorry i'm late i hope you've produced