Become Famous on YouTube
YouTube Ranking Factors: Getting Ranked In The Second Largest Search Engine
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YouTube has served as a launching pad for many famous people. For some, it helped even start their careers outside of YouTube. For instance, Justin Bieber was discovered from his YouTube videos, after which he was able to enter the music industry with full force and become an extremely popular singer. Others even base their whole livelihoods on YouTube, posting videos regularly and receiving donations and support from advertising. Generally how this happens is that the uploaded videos generate millions of views and the channels grow support via large numbers of subscribers. An example of a very successful YouTuber who has done this is PewDiePie, who has over 67 million subscribers.
The question then becomes: how does this happen? What drives some channels to grow and others to remain stagnant? What should one do when first starting out to grow a YouTube channel? Part of the answer lies in understanding networks. Whenever someone searches on YouTube, the results generated are displayed after taking into account a ranking of the possible results. One aspect of how this works comes from static metadata for uploaded videos such as titles, descriptions, tags, etc. This is one of the points highlighted by the article linked above: “YouTube Ranking Factors: Getting Ranked In The Second Largest Search Engine On YouTube.” These descriptions can be used for ranking in terms of relevance, much like the Google search engine. However, use of these properties can also lead to specific hyperlinks. If you happen to be viewing a more popular video with many of the same words in the title as another video, you may see a direct link to that other video as a suggestion. Thus, careful use of these elements can actually serve as two-way directed edges between your video and an already existing video with mutual benefit. This helps to explain why some music channels tend to get very popular by recording covers, since the titles and descriptions of these videos reference an already much more popular video and can hence be found from that video.
It is important to note, however, that the algorithm is not based strictly on static properties. One example is the customization feature. If you make multiple YouTube searches on one account, the search results will be customized for you based on your search history. Another example can be seen if you take a brand-new account and make a simple search. You will likely see something interesting. One might assume that the results displayed will be listed in order of the number of views. However, this is not entirely the case. Although the number of views is taken into account, you will also see some results with much lower views but posted more recently. From this, you can see what Google refers to as “freshness” in their paper “Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations.” This gives your newly posted video more of a chance to climb the ranks.
This was by no means a comprehensive list of all the factors that go into ranking in YouTube. However, we can definitely see the importance of understanding them when trying to grow a YouTube channel. YouTube is a search engine, and understanding how it ranks videos can help you figure out ways to raise your own videos in the search results. Having good content is of course a good and essential first step, but it is not the only step.