i get a lot of viewer questions about this so this is going to be a brutally honest video about the reality of youtube and why click bait has become a necessary part of life i know everyone says that they hate it but i'm actually going to tell you the truth about it and that's that there is a good reason why clickbait exists and not all of it is bad so when you see your favorite channels using it i hope that you'll consider what i'm about to tell you it's more complicated than you may think that's the subject of shop vlog number 36 so let's get started a lot of folks hate click bait because it has a stigma of dishonesty attached to it but the fact is not all click bait is the same some is bad but some of it isn't and before i get into the differences and tell you why you may want to reconsider your opinion of click bait let's talk about what the heck is going on these days on youtube click bait has been around for a long time but something has changed over the last couple of years youtube is not just overtly encouraging it they almost require a channel to use click bait if that channel is going to grow or even survive i don't want to bore you by going too deeply into the weeds of running a youtube channel but i think a real turning point occurred when youtube started messing with their subscription notification system you used to be able to subscribe to your favorite channel with a single click that's all it took you'd get notifications either on your home page or through email whenever your favorite channel posted a new video under that system though viewers tended to remain in their own viewing bubble they'd watch the channels they subscribed to but they wouldn't watch much content from other channels and that was a problem for youtube because they make their money by keeping you on this site and they believe that the best way to keep you here is to constantly recommend new content from new channels so they started de-emphasizing or at least devaluing the subscription system for example they stopped sending email notifications when your favorite channel posted new content and they introduced that little bell icon now you have to do extra steps you can't just click subscribe you have to select from the bell how much content you want to see from that person it became more complicated just to see your favorite videos a lot of viewers didn't know about the changes or didn't bother with them so when they stopped seeing their favorite content being recommended to them or delivered to their email they just assumed their favorite channels weren't making any new videos i got lots of emails and comments asking why i wasn't posting regularly even though i put out over a hundred videos a year why did youtube mess with the subscription system well i think the goal was to shift your focus away from your subscription list and instead encourage you to watch videos that they recommend to you on your home page feed to a youtube content creator like myself that home page recommended feed is the most valuable real estate on earth because our videos live and die based upon whether they get a spot among all those rectangles on that page my video has to compete not only with other channels that you like to watch but also a lot of crap some of it years old that youtube picks for you stuffs into that limited space and tries to catch your interest with healthy competition is fine but some might say this is a rigged game rigged by who the algorithm you see youtube analyzes everything that you watch and their ever evolving computer algorithm spits out video recommendations that it thinks will bait you into clicking so you'll stay on youtube so the very foundation of the platform driven by its own algorithm is in effect click bait how this works is a little complicated but it's really revealing if you want to know why everyone is shifting to these crazy thumbnail images and provocative titles take me for example i often spend days sometimes weeks making a video that will appeal to my audience but that video doesn't go out to my whole audience you see when i upload it to youtube the algorithm only test markets it in the feeds of a relatively small part of my audience mostly the bell ringers and some more casual viewers maybe some non-subscribers that the computer gods think may be interested in it that gets the video on a few of these home page feeds tucked in among all the other rectangles and that is where the battle begins because if that video doesn't stand out enough to draw a sufficient number of clicks among that initial limited test audience the algorithm kills it by recommending it to fewer and fewer home pages on the other hand if that video does stand out from the pack and generates a bunch of clicks the algorithm deems it worth more promotion on more home pages and more and more and more until it's finally served up to your entire audience if it does well enough it might be served up to tons of non-subscribers too and maybe go viral now this sounds relatively straightforward but when a video success depends not so much upon making good content that your subscribers want to watch but upon enticing the algorithm into placing that video in a feed full of dozens of other videos that the viewers didn't even ask for a feed that the average viewer just skims through quickly until something catches their attention you start to see why titles and thumbnail images are so important now maybe you don't use that recommended feed on the home page i generally prefer just to go to my subscription page and i click each channel individually once in a while to see what's new but the fact is that the vast majority of youtube viewers do use that recommended feed and that's where channels like mine have to live or die these days the result of throwing everyone into that limited space and saying either you get a lot of clicks fast or we're going to kill your video is to not only encourage clickbait but to require it it becomes an arms race where the most controversial titles the most ridiculous images and unfortunately sometimes the greatest level of dishonesty wins that's the reality of youtube now that's why more and more channels have had to use at least some level of click bait but before you say that really stinks you have to consider something that might change your attitude about click bait entirely before we talk more about this subject that a lot of people hate let's talk just for 60 seconds or so about something most of us love free videos like this one this video is free because of the family of brands i work with including audible if you're looking for something interesting to listen to go to audible.com stumpy nubs or just text dumpy nubs to 500 500 that's going to get you a free 30-day trial and access to audible's massive audiobook library i love audible i've been a paying member for the better part of a decade long before they started supporting this channel since my membership gets me one
