• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

YouTube algorithms

Steve Maskery

Steve Maskery

Old Oak
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87290 Laplagne, France
Does anybody, anybody in the whole wide world, understand how YT algorithms work? I certainly don't.

About a week ago I started to notice that a lot more people than usual were leaving a comment on one of my videos. It's the Sine Bar one from 2022, so not exactly recent. Then it started with my Square of Thales, which is even older, 2019. So I had a look at my analytics.

My viewing figures are usually in the upper hundreds per day. I'm no internet star. But for some inexplicable reason they have gone up. Just a bit...

Screenshot - 16_11_2024 , 10_47_34.png
That peak is over 1200 views. In one hour! And look at the percentages. I won't tell you the earnngs (well, less than 5k€ total in 18 years, so don't get too excited), but already it is about 4x a good month, and we are only half-way through November.

I wish I understood why this has happened, I have changed nothing. Indeed, I publish a lot less often now than I used to, because I'm not doing as much woodwork. Life is getting in the way. But long may it continue, eh?

S
 
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That sine bar video popped up in my feed, too. I've not had Youtube suggest anything of yours for years.
 
I have noticed lately that YouTube has been putting a lot of videos on my home page from random people I haven't seen before who have very few subscribers, the content being somewhat related to what I usually watch. I wonder if YouTube is trying to help the smaller channels overcome the massive hurdle of gaining viewership and subscribers by promoting newer channels rather than established ones.
 
SamQ aka Ah! Q! said:
Your reply: "Boo hoo Mate. Trying to get some attention for free, by slagging off my content? You're obviously inadequate, you have my pity".
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Lol! I have told him that I disagree and I think he is rude. It's perfectly possible to disagree with someone, even dislike them (I do, frequently) but there is no need to launch a public attack on them, especially when thy are not in the public eye and you know nothing about them.
But I've left his comment up there so that the rest of the world can see what sort of a person he is.
 
Therein lies the problem of social media. I hope this sort of thing does not put you off publishing stuff Steve. A thick skin seems to be a prerequisite for anyone prepared to open their sites to comments. Although I am not a subscriber to anything on youtube yours is one of a few channels I do visit regularly.
 
Thank you Andy. At one time it did get to me, but these days I'm more resiient. I could remove his comment, but I'd rather leave it so that the rest of the world can see what sort of a person he is.
I've not published much lately because house stuff has come first. We have been living in squalour for most of the year and we're nowhere near finished yet. (The good news is that we have a working heating sytem again - hooray!).
But I have rebuilt one of my jigs, The Ultimate Tablesaaw Tenon Jig, my magnum opus, really. The original was made out of MDF and has suffered somewhat in the intervening 16 years. This time I've used HPL, High Pressure Laminate. Fantastic stuff. I've filmed it, of course, just a bit more to do. The problem is that it will be a feature-length film, and most people have the attention span of a goldfish, so I'm unsure, yet, how to present it. But if it turns out to be the last thing I ever publish, I shall go out on a bang!
 
I read somewhere that even the developers at Google don't know how the YT algorithm works, but they do know what it's for - keeping people on YouTube, watching the maximum number of ads. And they can twiddle its adjustment knobs in a myriad of ways to change the details of its behaviour.
But in common with others, I've seen the "Home" tab featuring more old videos from people I've subscribed to, coming up near the top. And that has included your excellent Square of Thales one.
I expect in some ways the algorithm "reads" what we share on here and will promote videos to us that have been liked by other forum members. (I guess a sizeable proportion of us will have email updates going into Gmail inboxes, so it will be able to link up our forum membership with our YouTube watching.)

(My rule of thumb in this sort of thing is that if I come up with something that I think Google could do, its clever engineers will have already done it.)
 
Yep, another one here, square of thales.
 
AndyT said:
If we all keep clicking those links Steve will soon be able to fund a new workshop roof!
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LOL! That would be very nice. We already have a newly working (though ancient and decrepit) heating system (after it not working since the end of spring). I've just had a hot bath in a warm bathroom. Luxury.
 
I too had the sine bar video pop up. Don't be afraid of the video length I watch a guy whos channel Tasty Classics (its about saving old cars) regularly post videos up to 2 hours and people love them.
 
I don't get it. These are all old ones that got hardly any views when they were new, and now everybody's interested. The good ones, the box joint jig, rip fence, horzontal borer and the like, have dropped off the edge of a cliff.
Still it's all only temporary, I'm sure, the numbers are already reverting to more normal levels. It was nice while it lasted. But it's earned me more in the last two weeks than I would normally get in six months, so I hope it happens again!
 
I’ve had the arc one (watched it last night) and now the planing board for thin stock which I’m going to make. I’ve given them all a like but does it help if you get a comment also?
 
I had the Square of Thales and Arc vids appear in my feed last evening - even though I'd watched them when they were first uploaded, and Youtube had them marked as such.

I've also just had some old (and already watched) New Yorkshire Workshop vids in my feed too - maybe Youtube is running some sort of oldies but goldies campaign!?
 
Blackswanwood said:
I’ve had the arc one (watched it last night) and now the planing board for thin stock which I’m going to make. I’ve given them all a like but does it help if you get a comment also?
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I don't really know, but probably, yes. I have no idea how any of this stuff works, it's certainly nothing that I am doing (i.e. nothing at all).
 
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