YouTube Targets Misleading Content to Improve their Video Recommendations
As part of an ongoing effort to improve user experiences, YouTube recently announced plans to enhance its existing video recommendation process. Under current criteria, users scanning through lists of recommended videos often encounter intentionally misleading content. These videos, despite large numbers of views on YouTube, often contain blatantly false claims, inflammatory content or promote products and services in misleading ways.
However, with upcoming changes to YouTube’s recommendation system, users should encounter an increasingly high quantity of videos which deliver objective, valuable and useful content.
What Qualifies as Misleading Content?
YouTube is just one of many major online social media and content delivery services looking to crack down on the spread of misinformation. Google and Facebook also recently announced measures to boost user satisfaction rates by keeping a closer eye on the proliferation of content which contains:
- Inaccurate tags or titles
- Misleading content descriptions
- Thumbnails which do not match content
- Excessively repetitive content
- Overt scams, false advertising and more
Enhancements to YouTube’s Recommendation Process
Currently, many videos appear in a recommendation feed based on video view count as well as a user’s preferences and historical views of similar content. Moving forward, YouTube hopes to enhance this model through a series of internal adjustments to recommendation algorithms that take into account factors such as:
- Number of likes
- User surveys
- Quantity of user dislikes for a video or channel
In addition to limiting the spread of misleading content, YouTube hopes that tweaks to the system will help more accurately deliver valuable content recommendations via an intuitive search function.
Marketing Video Content Requires Understanding of Community Guidelines
YouTube’s upcoming update will primarily try to deflate the viral potential of videos designed with overt clickbaiting in mind. However, this push should also serve as a warning for all SMBs and startups hoping to continue marketing content via social media. To help ensure content isn’t flagged as misleading, inflammatory or inappropriate, it pays to carefully review YouTube’s Community Guidelines before planning a content marketing strategy via the platform.
Although no specific implementation timelines are available, YouTube indicated plans to roll out adjustments to its recommendation engine slowly at first and initially target U.S.-based videos. Eventually, once fully developed, expect these changes to be employed in YouTube domains across the globe to provide better experiences for all users.
