| > There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos Agreed. I once heard an estimate of 1 hour of editing for 1 minute of video, and I find that to be an extremely low-end estimate in my experience. And then, editing is only one part of the process. I spend possibly more time on writing (from outline to prose to revisions) than on editing, even when including basic motion graphics. > In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. This contradicts the experience that I have with YouTube as a creator. For reference, this is my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@XyrillPlays/videos - Just a silly little gaming channel. Ignore the bulk of the videos that are just VODs; if you sort by "Popular", you can see that practically all the views are on a handful of edited videos. There is one edited video there early on, which currently has 7.6k views, even though it was posted in a phase of the channel where videos got single-digit views. If it were true that "an algorithm decides essentially once", this would needed to have happened right then and there, except that it didn't. This video got 42 views "on its own", without any promotion of any kind. But here's the thing, as you said yourself: > But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. The same applies to YouTube videos. When I posted another edited video later, I put that previous video as an end card. And just that miniscule click-through traffic alone was enough to have the older video get picked up by the algorithm. And why did the newer video get picked up? Because I posted it to the subreddit and the Discord for the game. Video analytics on YouTube give a breakdown of where people are coming from, and it was very obvious how the first 100 or so views came from those places. Then after that, something clicked in the algorithm, as though it had become attuned to who might be interested in the videos, and it started recommending the video to people. From one moment to another, 85% of views are coming from algorithmic recommendations, which was 0% before. With the most-watched video on the channel, which is nearing 200k views as of right now, it actually gained traction with the algorithm right away because I had for the first time a pre-existing subscriber base to get the video off the ground on its own, but it has not really stopped accumulating views. It has certainly flattened off a bit, but I've definitely benefited from the game in question having its 1.0 release recently. I'm also seeing people share my video on the subreddit every once in a while in the same way how people repost old blog posts to HN every now and then. |