Youtube has the benefit of a huge audience, but organic discovery?! Come on. Unless you’re producing clickbait, appealing to tweens, crapping our memes, or pimping rage fuel, their algos will not put you up next. It’s almost comical how bad their recommendation engine is for discovery. Listen to a pop song? Doesn’t matter if it’s the only one you ever watched, now you’re being recmmmemded Ariana Grande until you die. At least that’s sort of comprehensible, but they also make weird connection too. Watch The Jimquisition, and because “games” you get gamergate and alt right trash. Watch a video on the moon landings, and because “moon” you get conspiracy theories.
The algorithmic purpose seems to be, “hey you like X, maybe you’d like an insane or hateful tangent to X? Would that keep you clicking?”
You may find it terrible (I don’t think it’s great, but it’s usually at least mediocre for me), but Vimeo has virtually nothing. Also, Vimeo doesn’t seem to rank well in search engines either. So yes, even if YouTube was universally terrible as you claim for organic discovery (it isn’t), it’s still better than basically nothing.
I think “better than nothing” is the perfect way to describe it. Almost anything else would be better, but there is effectively nothing else. I would point out that when talking about how Youtube does well on search engines though, it can’t hurt that it has that little connection to Google, the premier search engine.
I’m glad that you’ve had better luck with using it for discovery though, any tips on how how to get that to work?
The algorithmic purpose seems to be, “hey you like X, maybe you’d like an insane or hateful tangent to X? Would that keep you clicking?”
Organic my ass.