Understanding the YouTube Algorithm

Does Country Location Matter for YouTube Videos?

Yes, it does. YouTube uses location data to some extent when recommending videos to users. Google also leverages and uses location for processing videos. Your videos will primarily be recommended in the country where your account was created. However, if your competitors' subscriber impressions and channel grade/rank are superior to yours, entering your video's location won't significantly help you surpass them. The same logic applies to YouTube as it does to web search.

Whatever content you are working on (whichever country it targets), uploading the video from that country's IP (VPS/VDS) will be beneficial.

Is Deleting Negative Comments or Any Comments Harmful on Videos?

YouTube doesn't like comments being deleted. The YouTube algorithm recognizes all comments, positive or negative, and these comments increase a video's visibility. If you delete any comment, you harm the video's engagement. Deleting a comment signals to the algorithm that you are not open to criticism or that there's unpleasant misinformation in the video, which can reduce the video's visibility to the point of disappearance. If you report a comment and it's removed by YouTube, its impact on your video won't be as harmful as deleting it yourself. Also, instead of deleting the comment, try blocking the commenter.

Why Is Deleting Videos on Your Channel Harmful?

YouTube's algorithm tracks users. This determines whether your account will be suggested to other users based on their Browse history. Therefore, deleting videos means deleting hard-earned ranking factors and killing the history that affects your subscribers and those users. In a way, it resets you to a zero starting point. Additionally, our most-watched videos can be a source of views for other videos. Thus, deleting videos means deleting your source of views. We understand why people might want to delete old videos. These usually include:

• Embarrassing personal videos.
• Very old videos that yielded no engagement.
• Dead videos (not watched for a long time).
• Uploading a new niche/category.

Even for such reasons, do not delete videos. If you delete videos, your account will be flagged. The view and recommendation status of your current and new uploads will decrease. You will also lose the ranking and other benefits gained from the deleted videos. Deleting old videos can lead to a possible shadowban on your account, as we have observed.

Consequences of Uploading Copyrighted and Globally Blocked Videos?

If you upload 1 globally blocked video to your channel, YouTube might consider you an amateur and not penalize you. However, if you have uploaded a total of 3 globally blocked videos to your channel in the last 3 months, your channel will most likely receive a shadowban.

Is It Possible to Speed Up Video Processing Time?

Video processing is generally related to YouTube server status. And it is certain that YouTube sends videos from high-ranking channels to more powerful servers and prioritizes them for processing. Or, when examining it based on file/codec, the more a video is compressed or its quality is increased, the harder it becomes to read, decode, and process.

Example: Let's say video A has an MPEG4 size of 1GB, and an H264 (MP4) size of 700MB.

One processor uses less power and reads an MPEG4 file faster, serving it quickly. When reading an H264 codec file, the processor power increases slightly, and it reads it with more difficulty. You can observe this graphically by looking at the load on the graphics card or CPU power.

A faster video processing format, from fastest to slowest, is as follows:

• Matroska
• MPEG-4
• H264 (MP4)
• H265 (HEVC - High Efficiency Video Codec)
• AVI (AVI is higher quality than MP4 when using the MPEG-4 AVH / H.4 codec, as it's associated with the AVI DivX code, but it's also harder for the system to read)

So, when you upload MPEG4, you sacrifice a bit of quality, but technically YouTube can process it faster because there's no extra codec it needs to decode and deal with. However, YouTube generally recommends uploading videos as MP4.

What Should Be the Frequency of Ad Insertion in a Video?

The most frequent ad insertion interval is generally once every 5 minutes. 2 ads are acceptable for a 10-minute video, and a maximum of 3. Since YouTube has ad moderation robots, if you put too many ads, YouTube will notice this and won't publish all of them. Adding too many ads won't directly frame you as spam, but it will be considered an amateur strategy. Plus, viewers might get annoyed by too many ads and close the video early. Indirectly, the "Video Average View Duration" will drop. This is a problematic situation.

What to Do When Your Shorts Don’t Get Views?

Don’t waste time on channels that don’t get views, because YouTube doesn’t seem to evaluate each channel one by one to see which is successful or produces quality content.

In my opinion, YouTube is taking the easy way out. Even during the channel creation phase, it restricts some channels and not others. No matter what you do, your short videos go unwatched or remain at 100-200 views.

So, what should you do?

• Create 6–7 channels and upload your videos to them with small variations.
• Schedule two videos per channel at slightly different times (for example, 7:30 and 7:15).
• Then see which channel gains traction and continue with that one.

I do the same. For example, I upload videos to 16 channels; only 2 of them get views, and I continue with those. I remove the non-performing channels by selecting “Delete YouTube service” in the Google account. On the same Gmail account, I create a new channel again after 2–3 days and keep testing. Sometimes, after deleting and recreating a channel 3–4 times on the same Gmail, views start to come in. In other words, the Gmail accounts aren’t burned.

Additionally, if the channel you’re working on has subscribers but your new uploads aren’t getting views—and you don’t want to abandon the channel because of those subscribers—try uploading different styles of Shorts. Since subscribers were attracted by a certain type of content, if you produce new content close to that style, YouTube is more likely to recommend your videos to them, which leads to more views.