A YouTube Video Will Probably Never Help You Quit YouTube
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A video titled "How to quit YouTube" could teach quitting strategies and then ask its viewers to play it cool for another hour, act like they're still stuck in the loop, so the video will still be recommended to people like them. It'd rescue all the one-boxers.
2Good thought! Maybe a different approach to the same goal: sometimes if I watch a really good video but want to leave YouTube, I’ll search for something I don’t like and then leave partway through, hopefully putting most of the leaving penalty on something I don’t like.
I see what you're going for here, and I like when people output work that probably has net benefit on well being. That being said, I see some soft spots in your model, and I'm gonna poke some holes. I should note however, that I mostly just skimmed this post. It's likely I'm about to make a fool of myself.
First, I think your core claim is kinda correct. A YT video probably wont make you quit YT. However, that's not really what happens when people quit YT. It's more like this:
That's still a wild oversimplification. When I quit YT, it was mainly thanks to the Cortex Podcast, but YT videos certainly played a big part in updating me every time I watched a "Your Wasting Your Life Blah Blah Blah".
Also, addiction is hard. Fluctuate in and out of behavior before they find something that 'sticks' and they quit for the long term.
But TLDR: People update incrementally over a long period of time, and idk how good the YT algorithm is at tracking what videos, over a 1-2 year period, were the most important updates towards the final decision to quit the platform.
Popular, promoted, searchable videos that are demonitized/ad-free
From memory, Scott the Woz, is a super popular YTber, and he does not put ads on his videos.
I'm pretty sure YT claims that monetization status has no impact on the algorithm. Though, I am skeptical of this claim.
- Popular, promoted, searchable videos that leave viewers satisfied and complete, ready to put down their device and move on with life
- Search result videos that clearly and concisley answer the question without leading into further exploration/questions/viewing
I think these are pretty true to how YT works. I'll add that I think PH and similar sites probably employ this in a more intense way, but with a catch. A site like PH would want to eventually satisfy you, because being the app that... ends your session, has big 'cum back again' return.
Let me know if I missed the point, and am totally mistaken somewhere here.
Many good points and good question about how people actually quit! I don’t know for sure how people quit, and this post mainly addresses the narrower case of a single video causing someone to quit immediately for some measurable amount of time. Two mechanisms being considered right now: people quit on one dramatic change, versus people incrementally update over time until they ease over the boundary of quitting. It would be cool to see surveys of people who quit and see if quitting is gradual or something suddenly clicks.
It would also be interesting to what extent YouTube can deduce what videos correlate with users quitting and punish them regardless of their immediate chain breaking. For example, YouTube could look at two batches of comparable viewers, half who saw a certain video and half who didn’t, and see how many are still viewing an hour, day, week, month, and year later. I suspect with enough data YouTube could find some connections.
Additionally, maybe YouTube could gather user leaving or use reduction stats by channel rather than viewer. That way YouTube could gain confidence that a certain channel rarely makes people leave, so YouTube can recommend the content quickly while it is still relevant.
As for ad free success, I’m not sure if it is the same for all users but I searched Scott the Woz and clicked on the first video and got a pre-roll video ad, then clicked a second video with no ad, then clicked on the next Scott video and got a sponsored ad below the video.
Thanks for all the great points, I suppose it’s time to start making additional predicted observations for these different directions and see!
Additionally, maybe YouTube could gather user leaving or use reduction stats by channel rather than viewer.
Wow. Diabolical. I have never thought of this. Grateful to have this pointed out to me.
I searched Scott the Woz and clicked on the first video and got a pre-roll video ad
Actually, that makes sense. I'm making a prediction, that if I check the first Scott video when I search his name, the description will say something like "This video contains copyrighted content from XYZ-Corp and has been claimed". Going to check that now... Nope. Incorrect prediction. I was wrong there.
I know that I get that message, in my video descriptions, when I have copyrighted content in the video. Checking that now. And wow! This part of the description has gotten some pretty insane updates since I last looked at it.
This is in the description for a video in which I reviewed 10+ different movies. The owners of those songs have put claims on this video. and they-at least, used to-run ads on this un-monetized video.
It would be cool to see surveys of people who quit and see if quitting is gradual or something suddenly clicks.
I started writing a post on this, and collecting some data. But have now realized it's a much bigger project than I anticipated. But I agree that this would be interesting data.
Disclaimer : I was short on time but I think I got most of it, sorry if I'm missing something or if my comment is a bit lacking, I had to do this fast.
I agree that YouTube's end goal is revenue generation but it seems to me you're considering that YouTube's content recommandation algorithm is optimized for revenue generation via advertising, which I believe to be untrue. From what I have gathered following the ecosystem (I'm interested in it because I have a relatively successful YouTube channel) along the years, that is not the case.
The recommandation algorithm is not a monolithic system : each YouTube account has its own personal algorithm which mostly relies on the 1000 last videos watched by the account. The current goal is said to be "make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube". Like you said, YouTube wants people to stay on the platform and that's because over time, people will spend money on YouTube : this option has been growing significantly in the last 10 years with live options, superlikes, Boost, memberships, YouTube Premium, among other possibilities.
The advertising algorithm is completely decoupled from the content recommandation algorithm. The only relation with it is the fact that specific videos (+18 content for instance) will show only specific ads.
With time, YouTube is trying to decouple AdSense's revenues from YouTube's viability as a platform like I outlined earlier. Of course, ads will always pay more because they are that valuable but there is now a very much growing YouTube economy outside of ads. I could go look at the financial results to see if there's more info there.
Therefore, a successful "Quit YouTube" video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it's not good for ads but because it is stopping the user's satisfaction with YouTube.
The point about non-ad revenue is a super interesting point that I completely missed in the first pass, thank you for bringing that up! I think we could change the main claim to something more like: "as long as YouTube gets more revenue the more a user uses the site, then YouTube is incentivized not to show you videos that cause you to leave" or similar.
As for "make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube" I'm not sure how they measure that? It could be anything from survey results, to a predicted score based on certain behaviors. If they were really sneaky, they could use time spent watching as a proxy metric for satisfaction. I really don't know here what they are targeting or how they measure it.
As for ad algorithm being decoupled from recommendation algorithm, that is another interesting aspect, but I think the goal is still "keep people watching ads so we have another opportunity to run the 'best ad for this moment' model on them again".
As for the conclusion sentence "Therefore, a successful "Quit YouTube" video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it's not good for ads but because it is stopping the user's satisfaction with YouTube." I am still not entirely convinced by pinning the conclusion on user satisfaction. It seems more likely to me that YouTube is a revenue machine rather than a satisfaction machine, otherwise they would just turn off ads entirely. I would still lean towards something like "Therefore, a successful "Quit YouTube" video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it's not good for ads but because it is stopping the user's future interactions that have a chance of being monetized in any manner of ways, including superlikes, memberships, ads, etc"
Thanks again for the thoughts and the non-ad direction, lots to think about!
I would still lean towards something like "Therefore, a successful "Quit YouTube" video would indeed not be promoted in the medium and long term by YouTube but not because it's not good for ads but because it is stopping the user's future interactions that have a chance of being monetized in any manner of ways, including superlikes, memberships, ads, etc"
I think that's a fair assessment, I did not want to make it look like YouTube was a non profit haha, mostly that they have found that by sacrificing some money on the short term, they make sure they're earning a ton on the long term.
They are not really in control of what becomes viral or not. Of course, I'm sure they can push or ban one specific video but how could they be aware that a video is going to buzz about leaving YouTube? There's just too much content and some parts of the ecosystem are completely oblivious to mega hits videos (like videos with 10s or sometimes even 100s of millions of views, are simply never showed to some spectators). My point is that it's the algorithm deciding at scale and not YouTube. In its current state I also believe it would likely push it at first but then the video would plummet if it worked and could even be negative for the creator long term. Of course there's also the possibility that people watch videos but never follow through with them however good they are to making people act. (that's actually the base behavior lol, watching content has become a drug nowadays)
As for "make sure the viewer is satisfied with time spent on YouTube" I'm not sure how they measure that? It could be anything from survey results, to a predicted score based on certain behaviors. If they were really sneaky, they could use time spent watching as a proxy metric for satisfaction.
You're not far away from what they do! Through the years they have tried several ways to measure what's good, first with click through rate and % of video watch, then moving more towards total watch time (which is when longer videos started becoming the norm) and more recently towards watch time in session. (meaning the best behavior is people coming to YouTube for your video and then watching other videos after that) If you come to YouTube to watch a single video, the watch time better be very significant or it will be negative for the content you watched because they would rather have you longer on the platform.
About two years ago they have started saying that they were aiming for viewer satisfaction which is indeed pretty hard to describe but a mix of the different type of watch times is likely already good, to which they indeed add regular viewer polls to ask how you felt about recommandations and videos.
Nowadays, it's obviously become a mix of many different signals, with different values given to each. Contrary to popular belief, likes and comments are pretty much worthless to the algorithm. (although likes may have gotten a tiny bit of value back)
There is growing competition (even in long form videos which is much harder to setup than short form for a platform) so despite them being pretty much a monopoly, I don't think they are going for a full profit strategy. I think the AI debacle will keep Google in a competitive mind for sometime. On the other hand, when you're already so profitable, it may be a viable strategy to leave some money on the table in order to remain a de facto monopoly by making any competitor bleed money.
Also, from what I gathered, the shorts algorithm is very much different from the normal videos because the people watching short form and long have very different usage of the platform. Not sure if there's something different in how YouTube makes it work though, might just be because of audience behavior.
It's like a weird version of anthropic reasoning.
My current initial guess is that a platform values network effects, market dominance, and potential future monitization enough that they will continue serving users with adblockers while trying to convert them to ad watchers. Or maybe at some point in the future, platforms will start turning away users that never watch ads?
I think that YouTube specifically is now safely beyond the growth phase and deep in the extraction phase. But another thing to consider is how many people use the adblockers. If only a few, it is not worth blocking them. Every change has a cost, especially at a gigantic corporation like Google. Plus there is a small but nonzero chance of introducing a bug, which could disrupt the showing of the ads. So I would say that if the fraction of people who use adblockers stay below 1%, they will be an annoyance, but never a sufficiently high priority.
How do you think this applies to paid YouTube accounts? I have one, and I don’t ever see YouTube ads. I still see the in-video ads that the artists insert into their videos, but even then I can skip them easily, and YouTube actually makes that easier, since I can skip forward twice and I get a button to skip the segment.
YouTube is pretty far along the enshitification curve. I don’t see them changing things enough to turn that ship around.
Good question on paid accounts. At that point, I would guess YouTube would want to see if higher watch time correlates with lower cancellations. If more watching means less cancellations, then maybe YouTube is still financially incentivized to keep someone watching.
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