- Hello, Insiders, I am Rene Ritchie,
your friendly neighborhood creator liaison
and today, we are talking to Todd Beaupre.
Todd, what is it that you do at YouTube?
- So I lead the growth and discovery team
which includes responsibility
for our homepage and recommendations.
- When I first met you,
I had just gone full-time as a creator
and you were so great.
You gave me this worldview,
this perspective of don't think algorithm, think audience.
- In my role, I've always gotten
a lot of questions about the algorithms
like what time should I upload
to optimize for the algorithm?
How often should I upload?
And the way we design the algorithm
is actually such that we wanna give audiences the videos
and other content that they're gonna be most satisfied by.
And so if the audience doesn't really care
whether you upload it at three in the morning
or seven at night,
then the algorithm shouldn't care either.
And so what I encourage creators to do
is when they have some of these questions
and they immediately kind of think about algorithm,
replace the word algorithm in their question
with the word audience.
That's gonna give you a better answer
because we're aiming to serve the audience.
And so the more you focus
on understanding what your audience wants
and finding the best fit with them,
the algorithm is gonna match that.
- Yeah, the one of the biggest things for me
was when I stopped thinking
why didn't the algorithm like this video?
And I started thinking why didn't my audience like it?
- As a creator, I think the more that you
can put yourselves in the shoes of viewers,
and go through YouTube, and browse around,
and see what's gonna make you, as a viewer,
be interested in a particular video versus another video,
it might give you more perspective.
You may not get just thinking
so much about your own videos all the time.
Look at it from the viewer perspective.
- You mentioned previously satisfaction
and that is one of my favorite things about YouTube.
This concept that not all watch time is created equal.
- Everyone knows that watch time
is one of the factors we looked at.
That came from an idea
that we can learn a lot by observing the behavior,
what people do with their time
gives us some indication
of if somebody's not enjoying a video,
they'll stop watching it.
But we also thought that behavior
didn't tell the whole story
and that if there's a case where somebody
gets a lot more value out of a video
they watched for five minutes
then another video they watched for 10 minutes,
we wanna understand that value
and represent it when we recommend content.
And so the idea behind satisfaction
was in addition to observing what people do,
can we give them more opportunities to tell us
about the value that they got from their experience?
And so what we do is we run surveys about recommendations,
about particular videos that each viewer watched.
You may have seen one of these in your feed
and then we collect millions of responses of those surveys
and feed them right into the recommendation system
which can then learn a pattern of the types of videos
that tend to be more satisfying,
looking at a variety of signals across likes, and dislikes,
and time, and survey responses.
And then what we found is when we use those survey signals,
people ultimately are more satisfied
with the time they spend on YouTube.
And so I think this is a good example
of how YouTube isn't just focused
on just driving watch time in the short term
and just maximizing that.
We really care about the long term.
- I think that's something that I dealt with personally too.
There was a point where views started going down for me
and I realized that I could up the sensationalism,
but at the same time
that would burn out my audience in a way
and it would get me the views that I wanted quickly.
It would give me that instant gratification,
but it wasn't good for the long-term health of my channel.
But I'm curious, are there places where you would suggest
creators look for signals like that?
Is it likes versus dislikes, comments, retention?
- So as a creator,
I would just keep that North Star in mind
of you should be thinking
about long-term value for your audience.
When you're creating your video,
think about oh, well can this get a lot of views this week?
Or is this gonna leave a lasting impression with someone
such that they're gonna want
to come back to my channel tomorrow
and maybe even six months from now?
So build up that long-term relationship with your audience
I think we'll correlate quite well with satisfaction.
- For new creators or smaller creators
because when you say the algorithm follows the audience,
they worry that they don't have an audience
yet for the algorithm to follow.
So do we do anything for those creators?
- Yeah, so we have a team
that is specifically focused on this challenge
of trying to identify
audiences for creators that are just getting started,
for videos that we don't have a lot of information about.
And so yeah, with those videos and channels,
we do need to try some different approaches.
The title, the description.
When there are viewers that show up
that seems like they might be interested in it,
we'll show that video to those viewers
and see which of them react.
We really want to make sure that there is a path
for new creators to get started.
It's a metric we track,
how many new creators are succeeding on the platform.
We're very focused on that.
We care a lot about it
because we do believe that there's a lot of opportunity
there with new creators coming along
with new ideas all the time
and we wanna help those creators be successful.
- So one thing I've also heard from you,
especially when creators are figuring out
their content types is same audience, same channel,
different audience, different channel.
But it feels like as creators,
we have more options now than ever before.
We have the long form, we have Live.
We also have Shorts now that we can put on the same channel
or easier to put on the same channel.
Even podcasts, recently announced ways to make podcasts
more viable on the same channel, multi-language, audio.
How do you think about that?
Is it still just do you think based on topic,
based on audience interest?
Is it something you think we have to test more?
- Same audience, same channel means
if the content you're uploading
you think would appeal to the same audience,
you should just stick with the same channel.
If the content you're uploading
appeals to a different audience,
then you might wanna have a different channel.
In the multi-format, multi-language world,
we are looking for ways to make it
easier for creators to manage their channels
and multi-track audio.
We think that if you're really producing the same content,
might as well make it easy to just do that within one video
as opposed to having to upload separate videos for everyone.
And so we are seeing creators start to move
their separate channels for different languages
into the same channel
and that seems to be working quite well for them.
In the multi-format space
of shorts, and long form, and podcasts,
if you think it's the same audience
it helps us to put it in the same channel
because then when a viewer goes across formats,
we can leverage the fact
that oh, well, they watched this channel in shorts,
so let's see if they might be interested
in the long form, makes it easier.
And I would encourage creators to maybe experiment.
Maybe try in the same channel.
See what the reaction of your existing audience is.
And if it's not performing as well,
maybe just try a different channel
and see if that works better.
- Also as a creator,
I think we've almost put together these different spaces
so I'm not as stressed about testing it.
For example, my long-form videos
people primarily watch from the homepage.
My shorts people primarily watch from the feed
and podcasts, because they're gonna go into YouTube Music
and eventually into RSS as well,
it feels like I have a little bit more breathing room
and space to experiment.
- Yeah, it's all about enabling
both that kind of opportunity for experimentation,
but also opportunity for connection across formats.
- So how do you see discovery
continuing to evolve on YouTube?
What are the challenges?
What are the opportunities?
And what excites you most about what you're doing now?
- Yeah, I mean the great thing about this space
is that I feel like it's definitely not solved.
We're not able to read every viewer's mind
and understand exactly what they're going to want.
There's still lots of opportunities for us
to make the recommendations better.
Some of the things that excite me in this space
include things like the new technology we're seeing emerging
with what are referred to as large language models.
Much bigger machine learning representations
of the world even that can make the understanding of content
and the world much more nuanced.
And so we're exploring how to apply those
to recommendations to improve the quality there.
Still have a lot of work to do within multi-format
and enabling users to have journeys across VODs,
and shorts, and increasingly podcasts.
Another challenge that we hear audiences share with us
is that sometimes it's just there's too many choices
and they open up their homepage
and on the positive side,
there's lots of good recommendations.
But on the downside,
sometimes a viewer can just feel paralyzed
by oh, do I wanna watch that one or that one?
Or I'm not sure about this one
and just sort of all that decision making
makes it kind of less fun.
And so we're also exploring opportunities
how we could just kind of make the design
and the interface feel more entertaining, more fun,
and make the discovery experience feel less like work
and more just like enjoying videos.
- Todd, thank you so much.
I could literally, I do literally talk to you
about this stuff for days and days and days,
but I really appreciate you sharing it
with all the Insiders.
If you have any comments, if you have any questions,
please leave them down below
and then keep it real.