YouTube is a celebration of knowledge using video as the medium.
And like any system, it has its own language and rules.
This playlist exists to explain those basics –
what certain words mean, how the system works,
and the small details that are easy to forget but important to remember.
We thought it would be useful to have this on hand.

In this video, we’re talking about THE mysterious YouTube algorithm –
the one we all keep trying to satisfy.

So what is the Youtube algorithm?

Let’s begin by saying this up front:
There’s no formal documentation of YouTube’s algorithm formula that creators can use.
What exists is the logic of the prediction, not the math behind it.

YouTube’s algorithm is a prediction algorithm designed to predict whether a single video, shown to a specific viewer, will hold their attention — and for how long.

The algorithm has restrictions.
Yep even youtube have those.
It does not want to ask the viewer all the time: “did you like this video?”

So how does this all come together?

If you can’t ask, YouTube needs to look at what people do.
Why?
Because at the end of the day, it’s very simple –
you came to YouTube to watch.
Which makes the formula very easy:
you invest time,
YouTube needs to provide knowledge and value in each video.
The more time you invest in watching,
the more it means you got what you came for –
knowledge.

What is YouTube algorithm looking at?

It looks at:
What the viewer chooses to watch
For how long
And what they come back to

Now it’s important to understand that the YouTube algorithm has one thing in mind,
and one thing it works for – and that is the viewer.
Yes, YouTube is all about one thing, and that is viewer satisfaction.
It does not see creators.
It sees the individual viewer as its top priority –
their preferences and their past behaviors.
And one more thing:
it’s doing this per video.

Matching Videos with Viewers

Let’s try this in a different way, to better understand what I just said.
The YouTube algorithm is about matching a video with a viewer –
the one the viewer will gain the most value from.
And in order to do that, it looks at things on a per-video basis as the starting point for matching.
It looks at a video and its individual performance as the first criteria.
Yes!!! as hard as it is to hear, if your video is not performing – how many subscribers you have is not going to make any difference.

The algorithm looks at the category the video is connected to,
and within that category, it checks how well it performs compared to other relevant videos.
What the algorithm looks for are engagement signals –
like whether people choose to watch, stay, and interact with the video.
Those are the validations –
the behaviors we spoke about, that the algorithm translates into answering the question:
did this video indeed provide the value the viewer was looking for?

Next, when a video is selected as an individual, stand-alone video,
what can increase the odds of that video being selected is if the specific viewer in question
has interacted with or subscribed to your channel.

These are the basic things you need to know about the YouTube algorithm.
Now you kind of know why it has no numbers. Because every category performs differently, and every individual has preferences of its own.
So for the YouTube algorithm, everything is relative to which viewers it works for right now. And that’s the important thing to remember.

When we’re playing the YouTube game, we play it one video at a time, for one viewer at a time.

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