I should clarify something important.
Often on here people talk about the "algorithm" as if YouTube only has one algorithm. That isn't the case.
YouTube's algorithm is actually two agorithms; the home page algorithm and suggested videos algorithm.
The two algorithms are referred to as the recommendation system.
Most video traffic is generated by YouTube's recommendation system, not search results.
I read a lot of nonsense posts on here talking about; ranking, keywords, SEO, search results, etc.
Not a single one of these posts ever explained what I just have.
So one has people trying to sell a service to make your content; "go viral" or "move up the rankings"; yet they don't ever talk about the aforementioned.
About suggested videos algorithm.
When i was making a shit ton of views, i worked on that, and especialy on : how to rank with the help of a competitor/big channel.
I realized the keywords were not that important if your goal is to make a video exploding.
Let's be clear, keywords ARE important if you make regular content, it will drive traffic for months, even years, so if you make 3-7 video per week, it's huge. But that's not the point.
For exemple at the time, i was making around 60k/90k in 24h on any video, despite thumbnail, title, keywords optimised or not. But after some tests, some videos exploded. it was 200k-300k per 12h, sometimes more.
Of course i thought about the title, thumbnail, subject, retention or interactions ( at the time it was more like/retention) but i analysed more than 50 videos of my channel, and for most of them it was not about that at all.
Same for competitors in my niche. Horrible keywords management, sometime 20% likes, sometimes 60%, but some videos were exploding for them too despite that.
So i asked in my commentary section how people was finding my video, and a lot of time, they were talking about another channel. Not 5 or 6 but 1 or 2.
So i tried to understand how it was working, sometime it was the title, sometime keywords, sometime not that at all. I worked a lot on it and many things changed since.
That's something i'v exploited at the time, and keep exploiting recently with only organics views, so i will not give too much details, but even today, on a small channel, results are pretty good.
I think with views + likes managed correctly by a panel instead of 100% real views, it can lead to very good results.
Problem is, i checked a lot of panels, and likes are way too expansive. it's 13-30$ per 1000, or around 5$ but only 10-40 likes per day. So it's either too expansive, or you can't send a lot of views if you want to keep a ratio of 20-40% likes.
