YouTube Algorithm Explained from A Small Creator's Experience

Hi there! This article is written by Cyberian Husky! This page is dedicated to my whole journey as a YouTube creator from since I began creating my first video until this day when I wrote this article.

Cyberian Husky is just a "punny" way to say a Siberian Husky in the digital world, I picked up that name knowing that husky is a dramatic dog, and this specific dog-breed has quite a fame on the internet for being chatty and loud. But rest assure, I have a total opposite personality in my real life, lol. So yeah, I consider Cyberian Husky as my other persona on the internet.

To introduce you first, I have been running a channel named"Cyberian Husky" for 2 years until this is written. My channel's view is around 10k combined from 11 videos and 5 shorts. Today I will explain how I reached that milestone from absolute zero, this story will have lessons and can be handy for most YouTubers who are starting or will start later if you are planning to create a channel one day.

First, as a relatively new creator, I will say that the journey is quite a long, bitter-sweet one, that's because you will begin with a cold-start situation, nobody knows you, nobody bothers to click on your thumbnail, very few people like your videos, and worst, your views capped at 10 or less. You can see that on my earliest videos, that is exactly that, and I admit I sucked at making video games recording back in 2024, I barely had any strategy at all.

If you have seen my videos, most of my past mistakes when creating videos are cut flaws, coarse or small audio, missing videos (because I didn't hit record), annoying background musics, tedious editing, et cetera, et cetera. That's when I'm gonna tell you, if you had or will have this experience, that is totally normal, we are beginners after all, we have to experience some cr*p. However, as long as we learn something in the process, we will get better, and I am sure our own experience is equally valuable as the one you gain from others.

The first time I started, I had no vision or strategy at all. I only made videos for the sake of having fun, which was not completely wrong.. But the thing that was wrong, is about perspective. I as a creator found my video is okay, I even replayed my own videos a hundred times, but my viewers don't, they skipped on the first glance. I call this a creator bias.

People don't look all the tiny details we cared so much when editing. How many perfect and excessive cuts you did at the back there, viewers don't care. So the first time, I edited a 40-minute video to end up watched by less than 10 people. I was so disappointed, not gonna lie. But if I rewatch them again, I will agree that my sister ever said it made her sleepy after watching, lols.

So, I dilligently make a research and switch into our viewers' perspective, I watch other creators' videos which have the most views and learn how to mix it with my own style, that alone fixed half of my problems. The other half, of course, I needed my real audiences' judgement to see the whole thing. Back in the earliest days, I asked my close friends and my siblings to make a short review about what is lacking, what is too much, what looks funny, and what looks.. uhh.. funnilly strange.

I did all this when I realized the views are capped at 10 and it didn't increase anymore. Some people got into my comment section and told me that I put too much of the background music and it was annoying. I used to think most videos might need sounds and bangers so they didn't feel so empty, but turns out I was wrong, half of it, though. Don't get me wrong, music works, but conditionally, it is like playing a movie and we need the right moment to get the feel of it, I believe sound effect is the same too.

So, when did I get my first 1k views? Okay, so I used to make let's play series on 2 game titles. The first was Project Zomboid, and the second was Kenshi. Project Zomboid videos were failure, not because it was a bad game, but I might have done the editing wrong.

I used to have a pretty straightforward editing skill, that is, I didn't give too much effort to do extra miles. Every video was done as per what was recorded, and there was no extra spice at all, only cuts and cuts. You can imagine those videos resembling streaming videos, but with extra cuts. I'll be honest, I'm gonna leave as soon I see nothing is attracting my eyes at the first few seconds.

So, there I learned about "hooks", or you can just say an attention grabbing technique that you do at the beginning, which is happening in the Kenshi series. I am glad it did well and gained so much traffic on the next few videos.

Not only "hooks", though, I tried to revise my visualization by adopting graphics and media. I added images, meme audios and videos, I started using camera panning, zooming, cropping, and increased a few quality of life (QoL) on my editing. The results are crazily different from the earlier videos! But again, I'm in the video game industry, so this move was necessary. If you are in the different industry, like podcasts, I think it has different treatment, and yes, you will need to find your own niche too if it is the case because it seriously changes the gameplay.

With all that said, I learned it is better to do extra if it worths your time and effort to create better results. My Zomboid series only needed 1-2 weeks of progress to make 20-30 minutes videos, but my Kenshi took over a month and it showed greater views. It could be bias, but I also see the big difference here, from being ignored to at least getting noticed for a while. That was my precious "I got my recipee" moment.

Does increasing your editing skills matter? A lot! It increased my videos view from 12, to 120, to 300, 500, then 1.2k, with each respectively is a different video. Along with the changes I made, talking about attention.. I found out that we seem to be more like.. babies.. Oh that was funny I learned to make videos inspired by minors watching cartoons. Remember when we are easily hooked on cartoons over daddy's news channel? That can be explained with science. It is said that cartoon has so much energy and movement to keep us stimulated, so we keep watching and questioning what will happen next. This is psychology at play we are talking, and then we will understand why short videos on YouTube always delivers.

Yep, then comes YouTube Shorts, the short vertical video format that was relatively new to YouTube. This is what made people go into doom-scrolling. I feel bad for becoming a participant of the Shorts creator, but somehow becomes the victim of doom-scrolling myself, haha. But I'm not gonna lie, this feature is also quite a blessing for most new creators, it brings more traffics and subscribers than usual, and the content required is shorter and easier to made, which is dope. One of my short videos featuring Cities Skylines is getting hit with almost 5k views, followed by my free game tips video (1k) and The Sims shorts (1k). This is my first big numbers, again, I was a nobody. Short videos indeed can be a fast, go-to content to find your audience.

Now, what does it all have to do with the algorithm, you probably ask. If I summarize all of the above, this is the fundamental answer: your editing, story telling, video format, the platform, your audience preferences, past experience, all of those matters to the algorithm. This will be answer for the qualityaspect, what keeps your audience stay longer without force-quite the video and maintain your video retention stats. This, I believe will help the algorithm to spread the words to everybody else and tell people, "Hey this is a worth to watch video because someone else has finished watching the video", and it will arrive at someone else's recommendation. Quality usually stands out and speaks for itself. It just needs time to get the "boom" moment.

On the other hand, the quantity aspect should not be underestimated. I didn't tell people that I have an IT background, I can explain a bit about the fundamental of AI recommender system. Although we all don't know exactly how YouTube algorithm is working, but we can take a guess. AI recommender system is pretty common and adopted in almost all modern products today, and like current LLMs you can find everywhere nowadays, they need data to be trained. That said, your videos are the data, that includes all your video's metadata, all the tags, and all the data we don't know YouTube consumes.

The more videos you put into YouTube, the more trained and confident YouTube algorithm to put your videos as relevant and recommend your videos to others. It makes sense, right? That is the easiest part to explain about AI recommender system. So, the rest, whether your views work or not, it is actually a mix-and-match between the two, the quality and the quantity, this is what I believe should be the important parts most beginners should notice.

Neither can we let our quantity stick at 5 videos only, nor that we should break the quality of our video. I believe both aspects are important, because I also made a research before and found out a channel that have a thousand videos with lower tractions. Many videos does not guarantee you a like or a subscribe, there are tonnes of bad quality videos out there people wouldn't like to watch, and then there is a channel with 5 quality videos, that went viral like viruses, but again, remember some of them are also outliers.

Until the very bottom section of this post, I'll tell you what matters the most, don't care too much about how the maths and sciences go behind YouTube algorithms, just keep creating content that qualifies like other popular videos you see everyday, adopt their formula, keep your standards high, learn from mistakes, more importantly, be creative! Quality first, then your upload number should follow after. You want a quicker route, try YouTube Shorts first. I said about quality first, but you should consider not to go all-perfectionist mode.

Oh, yeah, don't forget to put an eye-catching titles and thumbnails! That's also part of your most important first-trigger to the audience. If you made the thumbnail bad, even the good videos will get overlooked, so be careful out there, buddy, I shamelessly admit I got my first 4-view video due to that reason.

Well then, that is all my 1-dollar for you, because 2 cents is too little, hehe.. I hope you are blessed with today's knowledge. Don't forget to come to my YouTube channel and subscribe if you feel generous. I will see you there soon, cuz there'll be more games to break!

Ho-ho-ho~

Woof bye for now, hoomans!

Stay safe in the wilds!