Live & Die by the Algorithm

I recently had a YouTube Short get over 2,000 views. Not making me famous, but good activity to my standards. My next three videos, though, went in the opposite direction. 53 views, 38 views, and my recent video has 12 views. Why the downward trend?

It could be my first video after my 2k video had the word “politics” in the title. It could be that I’m just boring to YouTube now. It could be any of those reasons and more. I think the main reason is that we live and die by the algorithm. The blessing of the algorithm is that you can have any video pop and get a ton of views. The curse is that the algorithm can get bored with you and ignore you like girls did to me in high school. Popular one day and lame the next. At least the algorithm makes you popular for one day. Now, I’ve had this happen before, so I’m not surprised.

I had a video go above 7,000 views, but all my other videos after had a downward trend. The Bridgetown Church video had a newsworthy title. This type of title is like fuel to the algorithm. The only thing I can say is that sometimes your videos do amazing, and sometimes they are forgotten, but you need to keep uploading to catch the next wave.

Update: I uploaded a YouTube Short titled “OpenAI Co-Founder Shares How The Bible Influenced Their LLM” a few days after I first posted this article, and it popped over 1,000 views quickly. I need better titles, maybe :)

Check out “30 Days of YouTube Shorts & TikTok Uploads. Gaming the Algorithm” to see the results of a test I did a while back.