I went back and forth on whether I wanted to write this post, but I've already sunk way too much time into the research and data gathering to turn back now.
So, I'm still under the likely misguided impression that if I interact with Youtube enough, I can make its algorithm work for me. I can get it to understand what I want to watch and improve the quality and relevance of the recommendations and search results that it sends me. How is this going? Well, here's a brief example that I found telling.
One constant goal I've had with Youtube for years now is trying to get it to recommend new trailers for movies and TV shows. I think that this is a fairly simple request, and Youtube has been under a lot of scrutiny lately to improve trailer search results because of the whole fake trailer kerfuffle from earlier in the year. "Trailers" is definitely a content category on the site, and a "Trailer" button regularly appears on my Youtube front page next to "Podcasts," "Film Criticisms," and "Variety Shows." I also run searches for trailers often enough that Youtube should have enough information to know what I'm looking for.
So, what happens when I open up Youtube on a random day and navigate to the "Trailers" category?
The first four displayed videos are trailers for upcoming films and shows. Then there's a clip of "Promising Young Woman," a Red Letter Media review of a recent superhero film, a clip of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," two "Honest Trailer" spoofs, and a film essay on "Alien v. Predator," before the next trailer for an upcoming film. Then come three more trailers, three commentary/reaction videos about trailers, and then three more trailers before the page refuses to load further results. That's eleven actual trailers and nine videos that can broadly be called film/TV promotion, but not trailers. There are also ads interspersed after every five or six displayed results.
I also searched "Trailers" to see what would come up. The first twenty or so results are trailers for upcoming movies and TV shows, but often grouped into particular categories. After the first six results (and three sponsored ads) I get three results that were "Popular in my area," then three "popular today" and even a "Previously Watched" category. However, I'm not counting the multiple attempts to steer me towards the "Shorts" section of the site that is essentially Youtube doing TikTok. The further down into the results I get, the more older trailers and non-trailers start coming up, including a "South Park" clip, reactions, "Honest Trailers," "Pitch Meeting," "SNL" parodies, and a random news alert. I was appreciative that about half of the sponsored advertisements were actually trailers themselves, but these results still struck me as pretty dire.
I expect better from Youtube, and I know they can do better, because there's another, less visible recommendation algorithm on the site. If you click into any video on the site, a sidebar of similar videos will populate. If you open a movie trailer, the accompanying sidebar videos have their own category buttons, including "Trailer." What happens when you click on this "Trailer" button? The first recommended video was for a new movie review from one of the Youtube channels I'm subscribed to. Following that, I counted thirty-seven movie and TV trailers and one "Honest Trailers" video before the recommendations stopped loading. And there wasn't an ad in sight. Why weren't these the results on my front page?
Well, the answer is sort of obvious, isn't it? Once you start watching any video, Youtube wants you to keep watching videos, and will give you the more relevant recommendations at that point to keep you engaged. The front page and searches want to push sponsored ads and channels that have longer content than the ones that publish official trailers, which rarely run more than three minutes a pop.
The long and the short of it is that Youtube isn't very helpful to me for keeping up with recent trailers because it insists on focusing on the most popular hits, and then prioritizes showing me content that is popular in related categories. It doesn't show me anything new until it hits a certain popularity threshold. Trailers for independent and arthouse films often don't get enough views to hit that popularity threshold, so they require more specific searches. You can sort search results by "new" to just get a listing of everything uploaded with certain keywords, but even here older results won't show up if they don't hit a certain view count.
The one thing that I will commend Youtube for is that I no longer see any fake trailers or "trailer concepts," when they used to be all over my search results. However, that just means that Youtube is perfectly capable of improving their results sitewide. They just don't want to.
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