[joe_the_user]

TL;DR; Does engagement equal success?

I have an account on Youtube that I used for only a specific interest.

Youtube's suggestions are pretty bad. And they've declined in quality. And Youtube makes a strong effort to selling me mainstream content that I uniformly reject. And I can find better recommendations on suggested videos fitting my interest than I find on the Youtube landing for my account. And I'd be for Youtube to keep a list of search terms and such for further viewing.

My deduction from this is that Youtube is more interested in pushing content of other people's choice than giving me what I want. And that's pretty standard for how all media has worked since the early days of radio.

So it seems like it would be easy for a content company to get engagement by giving people what they want to view. And the challenge problem is often what people want to view doesn't garner much payment per views. And so having a bunch of engagement by itself doesn't give you success, rather what makes money is careful balance of desired content and pushed-content (IE crap).

[slackoverflower]

Very much disagree. Youtube's suggestion algorithm are improved incredibly over the years. It is increasingly surfacing content that I find interesting. I spend much more time on Youtube nowadays, easy more time than Facebook. I regularly just go to Youtube.com landing page to see what it wants to show me and always shows great quality content. Youtube has done an amazing job with their algorithms, and its showing.

Check out this article: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16222850/youtube-google-b...

[anuh]

Engagement alone is not success but sustainable and improving engagement (I.e. strong and improving cohort retention) is a measure of success because it creates a high barrier of exit for you as a user to stop using the app. 74 mins daily is not easy to create and sustain especially when you don’t have a social graph (On Facebook you are spending time talking to friends, reading updates from friends and content) but on Toutiao - you are only consuming content.