Youtube Dislikes: Do Video Dislikes Really Matter On Youtube

When we talk about dislikes. I’m focusing on the dislikes and how they impact the impressions that the recommendation engine does. Have a look at the Studio. You have the impressions shown here in the orange bar and these impressions I’m talking about.

So the big question is how do dislikes influence getting more or less of those impressions? 

Practically speaking that means that your video gets shown to the viewer on the home page in the suggested video section. 

The goal of YouTube’s recommendation engine is to show those videos to a viewer. That the viewer is likely to enjoy watching and of course not showing videos to the viewer that the viewer will not enjoy. 

However, it is always learning. This recommendation engine is always learning for each individual viewer what that viewer likes and what that viewer doesn’t like. Since we are talking about dislikes, let’s look at the negative side. 

That the recommendation engine should show less of those videos to the viewer. There are several different ways. One particular way is that the viewer just doesn’t click a video that gets recommended to that person. 

A second signal is that if the viewer clicks the video but then has just a very short watch time. You guessed it already. Here’s also where the dislikes come into play.

If a user dislikes a video, well, then it’s obviously a video that the viewer didn’t enjoy. Of course, there are also other ways how the viewer can explicitly tell the algorithm that he or she is not interested in. 

For example, if you click the menu on a video then you can tell YouTube “not interested”. 

So, all in all, we can say that all these signals give the algorithm the incentive to recommend less of those videos to the same viewer, less of the same video topic, less of the videos from a given channel and so on. 

That was really interesting when I was at VidCon answered a few questions. They looked at how videos got recommended. They were explaining how the recommendation system chooses videos to show to the user and if it does rightly. What they did in order to prove to us how the recommendation system made. Its decision is by looking at the like to dislike ratio. 

You know, the likes versus dislikes you also see in the Studio nowadays. This ratio is not the only factor but for them in this situation. It was a usable indication of whether a video is worth recommending or not. And to no surprise after the talk, I witnessed how another youtuber asked about this likes and dislikes ratio. 

Whether this is actually a factor in the algorithm and he explicitly confirmed that this is a data point that feeds into the algorithm. However, he also said it’s only a small factor.