I was reading a bit how the YouTube algorithm works and people are saying that it doesn't look at subscriber counts anymore. What it does is focuses on retention and the ideal retention marker for videos to get naturally boosted is 60%. If they fall below 30% then they won't get recommended much at all. If this is the case, how do I ensure I keep my percentages above 60%?

From what I understand, the model they used before was based on subscribers and view counts.

Now what they do is look at not only viewer retention, but virality and topic scores. So yeah, it does look for videos that have higher retention for viewership and when it find some, it links them to other videos in the same niche or topic base.

Not anymore. I noticed when I do searches, videos with very low view counts and subs get shown to me now instead of everything with high numbers at the top. This is good news for smaller creators.

23 hours ago, HNDean said:

Not anymore. I noticed when I do searches, videos with very low view counts and subs get shown to me now instead of everything with high numbers at the top. This is good news for smaller creators.

I noticed this too, this changed maybe 4 or 5 years ago. I didn't know what was going on. Like the video I was specifically looking for was almost 10 videos down and before it were a lot of lower viewed channels.

Yup! It is because these things are too easily botted. I mentioned this in another thread. A lot of social platforms switched to different metrics to rate quality content and for YouTube, the best measure for this is watch time retention.

On 7/16/2026 at 8:51 AM, justdave said:

Yup! It is because these things are too easily botted. I mentioned this in another thread. A lot of social platforms switched to different metrics to rate quality content and for YouTube, the best measure for this is watch time retention.

Huh. I didn't hear about this. I guess it would make sense to move away from a model that allows for people to bot things. It makes me wonder what actually matters outside of retention time. There has to be other things that come into play here.

On 7/28/2026 at 9:25 AM, johnnykipp said:

Huh. I didn't hear about this. I guess it would make sense to move away from a model that allows for people to bot things. It makes me wonder what actually matters outside of retention time. There has to be other things that come into play here.

Keywords. It is really simple now. The issue is that you are competing with hundreds of thousands of videos being uploaded every day. So you might get recommended for some stuff, and another video you make might get absolutely no traction at all.