> Because YouTube doesn't care what you want--YouTube cares what it can monetize.

> You are the product, not the customer.

> Once you internalize that, stuff that Google does makes sense.

They published their algorithm. They rank items according to predicted watch-time. The other poster is probably correct, in that many people use these long classical music videos as background music over and over (i.e. high watch time) and so they're highly ranked.

Interesting. When and where did "they publish[] their algorithm?"

RecSys 2016

Covington, Paul, Jay Adams, and Emre Sargin. "Deep neural networks for youtube recommendations." Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on recommender systems. 2016.

Nvidia furthermore implemented/released it for TensorFlow, and for their new Recsys engine:

https://ngc.nvidia.com/catalog/resources/nvidia:wideanddeep_...

The thing is, it doesn’t even show me funny cat video anymore. It’s the same classical music video recommended over and over again.

To be honest, the more I think about it, the more I don’t know what money is YouTube trying to earn.

It’s probably just a dumb algorithm.

I think it has a grasp of revisits, I forget the exact terminology but if you rewatch stuff I tries to predict will you like to watch it again. Some stuff is not worthing multiple times though, once is enough. But music videos can indeed be watched multiple times.

I think I heard somewhere that a lot of kid videos rank in the top stratosphere of view counts on YouTube because kids just play stuff on repeat. There's probably a lot of repeat plays going on across YouTube.