My Video Went Viral. Here's Why

Veritasium · 5.6M views · 2019-05-19 · 23:43

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Overview

Veritasium's Derek Muller explains his hypothesis that YouTube's algorithm, not viewer preference, drives views, and that click-through rate has become the key metric. He argues this pushes creators toward clickable titles and thumbnails and leads to burnout.

On Hacker News

Cited in threads about recommendation algorithms and clickbait as a creator's inside view of why optimizing for click-through rate shapes content.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2019–2023

Topics

Product, marketing & sales Internet culture & memes AI & data (other)

What people said

jlokier · 2021-07 · Recommendation
This video from Veritasium goes into more about Youtuber burnout, self-blame, dynamics and the drive to non-platform revenue streams: [VIDEO] If you find the apparent contradiction between Youtube success and creators needing to built out non-platform revenue streams strange, the video gives a pretty good theory explaining why. It's possible that a small number of creators are taking most of the revenue at any particular time, and the set of outstandingly successful creators keeps changing, which it might due to the promotion algorithm. That gives all of them reasons to build out non-platform revenue streams. I'm not saying Google/YouTube aren't taking too much. But hypothetically, even if they took 0% cut, the above could still happen.
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eins1234 · 2020-11 · Recommendation
Long time Veritasium subscriber here. He actually made a great video a while ago explaining why professional Youtubers don't have much of a choice when it comes to clickbaiting with titles and thumbnails, because it's the only way to reliably get lots of impressions and views and grow their channel: [VIDEO] It made me gain a bit of empathy for creators using these tactics on Youtube and tolerate it as long as it's not being used to promote content that's devoid of any substance, which is pretty much never the case for Veritasium videos or any of the other educational channels I subscribe to.
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shortcake27 · 2023-06 · Reference
Veritasium has a video about this and I’ve seen other creators like GothamChess and maybe even Tom Scott talk about how they have to create clickbait thumbnails otherwise they get no views. The YouTube algorithm punishes creators who don’t use clickbait. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

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