Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. At the time, that was a lot of money.
What am I saying, that’s an insane amount of money, no matter which year it is.
Anyway, since then YouTube has gone from being a bit of a novelty, into a fundamental part of every internet user’s daily life.
In fact, more than one billion unique users visit YouTube each month. More than six billion hours of video are watched each month. (That’s more than an hour for every person on the planet!).
It gets better. More than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Where are all these videos and watchers coming from? Well, more than 80 per cent are outside the U.S.
So, with these kinds of volumes, how do people find things they want to watch?
As you’d expect with a company owned by Google, there is a lot of tech smarts behind it. In fact, there are more than one million lines of code that form the ‘algorithm’ that delivers recommended videos to YouTube members.
This video interview by Computerphile with Christos Goodrow, the Head of Engineering at YouTube, explains how this algorithm works without actually giving you the detail.
Why is this important? Well, if you want your video to be recommended, if you want to optimise your content to appeal to a wide audience, it pays to understand how the search algorithm works.
Plus, this shows you the depth and breadth of customer insights that YouTube, and indeed Google, have on its users.
YouTube’s secret algorithm
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