[colechristensen]

The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size.

You can easily A/B test yourself into mediocrity by constantly optimizing for a larger, dumber audience. They stop liking your old content (despite your dumb faces, etc) so you make new content they like more, keep that cycle up for a while.

And you end up making emotionally charged rage-porn political videos and have become the next Facebook/cable news/etc.

This is also why the second or third album for a band is usually the best; they get popular and start letting their audience design their music and become repetitive and mildly awful.

[WastingMyTime89]

> The question not being asked is how your audience changes A vs B in other ways than size.

That's not how it works.

The most important factor to get views on YouTube is the recommendation algorithm. It makes a huge difference. YouTube will not even push your videos to people who are subscribed to you if the recommendation algorithm doesn't favor them.

As the click-through rate is an important part of how the algorithm decides what to recommend, you need a catchy thumbnail and a somewhat clickbaity title or you will be reduced to oblivion by people who use one regardless of the actual quality of your content. The story is the same with the length of video.

Veritasium made a couple of very good videos on the issue if you are interested.

[dark-star]

Youtube algorithms are truly weird. I have a YT account with, I think, 3 or 4 subscribers and maybe a dozen or two views on the 10-20 videos I ever uploaded. I basically use YT to upload things that I want to share with some close friends.

Then, earlier this year, one of my videos suddenly skyrocketed[1]. It was an old video, 10 years or so, and it only consisted of one 10 second scene of a movie that I found funny at that time, and that I shared with a couple friends. It had about 50 views until march.

Then, it suddenly exploded, and now that video has just short of 1 million views, with a peak of ~60k or so per day.

I have absolutely no idea what crazy algorithm suddenly started recommending a 10-year-old video that is nothing more than a 10s snippet from a hollywood movie to millions and millions of people around the world.

The most interesting part (for me) was the psychological effect this had on me. First, my phone started sending notifications like crazy (I turned them off pretty quickly). That changed into a daily morning-routine of "let's see how many people watched the video this night"... Then, when the new followers came (I gained a couple hundred during that time) I had a feeling of guilt because I think they somehow "expect" similar clips from me from now on, and I would be letting them down (of course, totally irrational, I could care less of what some random people expect from me). Then I started researching how much revenue I could have gained from that if that were a "real" video with original content and ads thrown in.....

It was a wild ride :-D

[1] https://imgur.com/a/5sFD9of

[vmception]

the only culture I like about Youtube is how the other commenters and viewers know that they all found each other due to the algorithm, because they watched anyway!

[skrbjc]

*couldn't care less

[alexanderdmitri]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/could-couldnt-...

[yessirwhatever]

What the parent comment said still applies. Algorithm or not, you can become a top pop singer either by having a really good voice and being talented or by being singling about how you enjoy something controversial just to create outrage. The only difference is your audience.

[BoorishBears]

The algorithm accounts for that.

If you sound like a dying cat, your click through rate will be high, but your average watch length will be low.

I agree there's a problem with how the algorithm drives creators to this stuff, but it's also not that unsophisticated that clickbait = success

[yessirwhatever]

Yet, all this does not justify clickbait.

[WastingMyTime89]

It's going to be really hard to be a top YouTuber if the YouTube algorithm just doesn't show your videos in the same way the best singer in the world would never get any audience if no one could hear them sing.

[geerlingguy]

This. And the Veritasium video is linked later in this thread.

[whimsicalism]

More than that, they are probably training models to predict the click-through-rate based on the image thumbnail, automatically discounting your content if it doesn't look like this, even if it does end up attracting clicks in reality!

[qwertox]

Also, I believe Jeff would have even more viewers if he held a bra instead of a Pi in his hand, with his facial expression being the same.

Jeff, could you do a test and report the results? ;) Maybe dealing with Raspberry Pis isn't as lucrative as you thought.

Other than that (I also get triggered by the thumbnail thing), your channel is one of the very best on YouTube.

[ASalazarMX]

Creators are optimizing for money, YouTube's algorithm is the one optimizing for audience size.

[goohle]

Half of general audience has IQ below average.

[marginalia_nu]

That's not how averages work.

[goohle]

This is how IQ is defined.

[marginalia_nu]

No, it is not. 68.2% of the population is in the average span of 85-115 IQ. 15.9% is in the below-average span of 0-85.

[goohle]

> No, it is not. 68.2% of the population is in the average span of 85-115 IQ.

Yep, 50% of them are below 100 IQ, 50% are above 100 IQ.

Official definition of IQ: measure average IQ of a population, then label the point where 50% of population is below average as 100 IQ points.

[readflaggedcomm]

It is. Specifically, IQ is assumed or asserted to follow the normal distribution, where mean equals median and mode.

By definition, half are below the median. The normal distribution's median is equal to the mean, so half are below mean.

[jgalt212]

A/B testing attracts the bots in my experience. Peoples' tastes change quicker than the bots' decision models do. Given that's somewhat of a bold statement, then try this thought experiment: If A/B tests actually work, then wouldn't you expect there to be zero films and/or TV shows released that are flops?