> some of a search/adtech company's revenue streams and departments/careers might currently depend on delivering low-value search hits
What I've come to realize is that most sites that actually get significant traffic these days that run ads (so, all of them) don't really care too much if companies paying for ad space get a good ROI. There are so many stories of companies launching a campaign on Facebook with something like a $10k budget, not configuring the targeting exactly correctly, and burning through their entire ad budget in a few hours with only a few conversions to show for it. Looking at Twitter recently, the only advertisers they seem to be able to attract look to be overseas companies selling junk products for cheap, usually with some kind of "made you look" aspect like bikinis. On that last point, YouTube Shorts also seem to very heavily weight things that appear as if they're going to show some kind of nudity, which of course they don't, just very clickbait-y looking thumbnails in general that don't match the actual content of the short. Does YT Reels require that the thumbnail be a frame from the actual reel? That always seemed like the best policy to me, but of course people game it by putting one "hero" thumbnail frame in that doesn't actually come from the rest of the video to be able to select that as the thumb.
This exact problem winds me up when it comes to sailing channels on YouTube, I get that most people just want to look at attractive people sailing about in exotic locations but I wish there was a way to tell YouTube that if I'm searching about boats I'd actually much rather watch someone's long-term restoration job on a 1970s project boat or a very experienced person talking about sailing in the places I actually live near. There's more of that sort of content than I could watch in a lifetime but it only takes one accidental click and your weeks of carefully training it for 'this, not that' falls apart like wet cake. Surely from the perspective of someone buying ads (admittedly I block them so it's a moot point in practice) they'd rather hawk high-value sailing equipment at me than low-value generic youtube tat I've never shown any interest in?
I know it's very much not in their interest to develop this since your eyeballs are the product but it would be so great if you could explicitly give the YouTube algorithm heuristics like: 'if the context is sailing exclude videos that heavily feature couples/relationships' or 'if the video sounds like that particular breed of shrill, hyperactive vlogger I'm definitely not interested'.
What I've come to realize is that most sites that actually get significant traffic these days that run ads (so, all of them) don't really care too much if companies paying for ad space get a good ROI. There are so many stories of companies launching a campaign on Facebook with something like a $10k budget, not configuring the targeting exactly correctly, and burning through their entire ad budget in a few hours with only a few conversions to show for it. Looking at Twitter recently, the only advertisers they seem to be able to attract look to be overseas companies selling junk products for cheap, usually with some kind of "made you look" aspect like bikinis. On that last point, YouTube Shorts also seem to very heavily weight things that appear as if they're going to show some kind of nudity, which of course they don't, just very clickbait-y looking thumbnails in general that don't match the actual content of the short. Does YT Reels require that the thumbnail be a frame from the actual reel? That always seemed like the best policy to me, but of course people game it by putting one "hero" thumbnail frame in that doesn't actually come from the rest of the video to be able to select that as the thumb.