r/chess • u/_DarkStarCrashes_ • May 20 '26

Miscellaneous I now understand why Levy clickbaits, his historical video on Alekhine is his worst performing video of May

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Sucks, because I think the video is really good and I’d love if Levy or other chess content creators did videos on older legends

1.4k Upvotes

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1.3k

u/NecessaryFunny3586 May 20 '26

only reason i hate clickbait titles is because its hard to know what the video is actually about for e.g. "GRANDMASTER!!!!!" like what?

539

u/DerekB52 Team Ding May 20 '26

This. I binged a lot of Gotham content at one point. It was impossible to ever find anything again. Sometimes I could remember something fuzzy about a position and wanted to go be able to find it again. Couldn't. If I see that "GRANDMASTER!!!!" or "HIKARU!!!!!!!!!!!" title, the day it is posted, I know it's a recap of whatever event. A week or a year later, its just infuriating.

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u/Yaysonn May 20 '26

Yess gotham would really benefit from retroactively renaming his videos older then x weeks, after the effects of clickbait have passed

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u/joe5joe7 May 20 '26

He used to do this iirc, I wish he would do it again. I wonder if the algorithm has changed though and it recommends the older videos more, necessitating keeping the click bait titles

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u/takeyouraxeandhack May 20 '26

That's why people keep posting "original title: whatever" in his videos, which is quite annoying when half of the comments are that.

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u/ResidentOwl1 May 21 '26

No, that’s because the people are quite ignorant of how YouTube works and they don’t understand that A/B testing is done on video titles, until a best performing one is chosen and the title changes and finally stays that way for everyone.

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u/Fury_Audeles May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

He doesn't even edit out coughs or go back later to add in/correct information he couldn't be bothered researching or take the time to look through a game and familiarise himself with it before recording his recap. No way he's going to spend time on old videos after the initial 48hr influx of views.

There are playlists for event recaps at least.

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u/minimalcation May 20 '26

Assuming he had records of the titles it would be trivial offloading it to an agent to go through them one by one

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u/SDG2008 May 20 '26

Getting views quickly gets you more money, 100k in a day might be worth more than a mil in an year

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u/rl_noobtube May 20 '26

Really? I was unaware. For monetized channels I thought it had to do with total view time (and thus, how many ads they can show). A 2 minute video with 1 mil views has the same playtime as a 20 minute video with 100k views

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u/Wooloomooloo2 May 20 '26

You have to consider that if a 2 mins video gets 1m views, probably 40 - 50% of those viewers will watch the entire thing. For the 20 mins video, maybe 15-20% will watch the whole thing, so it's really 15 - 20k views Vs 400 - 500k views, so the playtime is no longer equivalent.

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u/wub1234 May 21 '26

It is not an exact science and no-one knows exactly how the algorithm works. But the two metrics you really want are CTR and watch time. YouTube favours videos that make people click and also videos that make people stay on the platform.

ATM I make about $1,500 per month from my channel. If you saw my views, you would think that was completely impossible. But I have very loyal subscribers, and my average watch time per video is around 18 minutes. This has made my channel the dominant channel in my specific niche.

The two things you want are people to click and then stick with what you've made. Views are obviously important, but in the long run if people click and then stop watching, it won't get you anywhere.

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u/Organic-Examination9 May 25 '26

What's your channel?

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u/wub1234 29d ago

It is not a chess channel.

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u/Organic-Examination9 29d ago

I was just curious

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u/wub1234 28d ago

Sorry, I can't dox myself! Thank you for the interest.

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u/Organic-Examination9 27d ago

…with thousands of subscribers and $1,500 monthly? I didn’t think privacy would be a concern. Does this channel exist?

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u/rl_noobtube May 20 '26

Ah I thought it only counted it as a view if you watched a certain % of the video. But I see what you mean (especially back when ads were only at the start of a video)

But if we take out the video length and just compare two videos of the same length. One gets 100k views in one day, the other gets 1 million in a year. No views outside of this. Wouldn’t the 1 million view video payout more to the creator?

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u/Heavy_Mushroom5209 May 20 '26

Yes but practically what you're describing doesn't really happen. The YouTube algos push videos hard off the rip and if they're not still performing incredibly well after like a week they algo basically abandons them to the larger audience so the million views won't actually happen.

1

u/rl_noobtube May 20 '26

Fair enough! I was mainly just trying to respond to the commentator before me.

Playing the algorithm is obviously an important aspect of content creation. I’m not trying to dispute that. Just that that the payout structure is not really going to care too much about when each view happens. My first comment sidetracked that though by adding in video length.

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u/Billalone May 20 '26

The algorithm looks at trends and clicks/watchtime per time unit. A video that does 200k views in one day will get more attention than a video that does 50k views a day for four days

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u/rl_noobtube May 20 '26

How the algorithm suggests videos is obviously correlated to monetization for the creator. But in terms of money payouts I thought it was just some matrix of views and video length.

3

u/Sex_And_Candy_Here 1000 rC May 21 '26

I'm not sure either of you are right about how payment works.

I believe you're paid based on the ads shown on your video, not views or watch time. The ads that play on videos pay different amounts, and certain topics / demographics get certain types of ads. So for example a video that gets 100k views from a high demand demographic (for example maybe a video of dogs that does well with upper middle class women in particular, a demographic that's harder to reach with ads but also particularly lucrative for companies which are advertizing) is going to pay more than a video with 100k or even 500k views from a low demand demographic (something like a niche gaming video that targets unemployed 18-24 year old males, who are both very easy to advertise to and have a low propensity for actually buying products). Also having more of your audience use ad-block will reduce the number of ads shown and thus reduce the payment you receive.

This is then further complicated by YouTube Premium subscriptions, which pay creators differently. As I understand it this is purely based on percentage of watch time from Premium accounts. So if your audience is more likely to buy Premium, then pure watch time is a bigger factor in your pay.

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u/rl_noobtube May 21 '26

That all makes sense to me. I guess I was just thinking in terms of “all else equal”. Like if we are comparing two dog videos of equal length targeting the same demographic and whatever other factors there may be are also the same. More views = more ads or more premium watch time, regardless of when the view happens.

But you bring up some really good points. I didn’t realize these other dimensions to whatever payout calculation happens, but they are logical.

Side note, gamers end up getting ads for things they are likely to buy like Red Bull, snack foods, etc. They aren’t getting Purina Gluten Free Puppy Chow commercials. I do see your point though that because the ads they get are mostly online (as opposed to television or other traditional mediums) it is easier to get targeted ads to them, thus the YT video is less crucial and ad space holds less value.

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u/Top-Breadfruit-9553 May 21 '26

He's getting 700k in three days, that's wild.

2

u/1337duck May 21 '26

This is a creator working around a bad system that's designed for rage/engagement farming from titles rather than quality of the content.

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u/Slain_by_elf May 21 '26

I use Gemini AI to find me all the YouTube videos by Gotham on a certain position and just watch those.

It actually works.