Going Viral on YouTube – How to Make a Trending Video
Link: https://boostlikes.com/blog/2017/09/ways-video-trending-youtube
Watching YouTube videos is a slippery slope. A person goes in thinking they’re only going to watch a few of the hot new videos, and they end up spending their entire night going through the Trending section of the site. Many of us have probably found ourselves on this end of the spectrum, and yet it’s likely that very few of us (if any) have actually been one of the posters of a trending video that thousands of people end up watching. The reason behind this is likely due to YouTube’s complex video ranking algorithm.
YouTube’s video ranking algorithm is somewhat analogous to our page rank discussion for search engines in class. For any video that someone chooses to watch, YouTube typically has other related videos shown as impressions – i.e. there are other videos that are listed as “recommended” due to their relevance to the video you are currently watching. This structure can be viewed a network with hubs and authorities – the video currently being watched is a hub that links to various recommended videos, which are the authorities. When updating the scores, if an authority video is viewed, it’s rank in the YouTube algorithm would increase, making it more likely to show up. However, one difference in the YouTube algorithm is that if a recommended video is not viewed, it’s rank would actually decrease (as opposed to in class, where our score would never do so – it’s relative rank would only decrease after another round of updates). This is part of the reason why the videos you see on the YouTube Trending page are always changing – the YouTube algorithm is constantly updating the rank of videos.
To complete our analogy of the YouTube video ranking algorithm to our hubs and authorities page rank model, we can take a look at how the hub video’s rank changes. Recall we defined the hub video to be the video a person is actually watching. If a person decides to watch another video on YouTube after watching the hub video, we can say that the hub video had a cascading effect on the viewer, and made them continue watching videos on the site. This positive feedback would in turn increase the rank of the hub site by YouTube’s algorithm, due to the fact that YouTube wants people to spend more time on their site. This updating method of the hub rank is very similar to our method discussed in class – an authority a hub points to (the follow-up video that is watched) increases in rank, which makes the hub also increase in rank.
Overall, this article describes various factors that are taken into consideration in YouTube’s video ranking algorithm. The analogy made to our class discussion above is undoubtedly simplistic, and fails to account for many other factors mentioned in the article, such as length of the video or popularity of the uploader. Nevertheless, our class discussions are a great way to understand some of the basics behind a very complex algorithm used by one of the most popular entertainment websites out on the world wide web.