What does this YouTube algorithm say about us?

It clearly works. But ... why?

I’m not 100% sure this is true for non-golf videos, as that comprises a GREAT deal of what I watch on YouTube. Certainly the awesome crew at No Laying Up does NOT do this, and you should support them by watching any one of their great series.

But way, way more golf “influencers” have videos that look like this from their respective homepages on YouTube:

The group above, in order, is Seb On Golf, Good Good, Rick Shiels, Peter Finch and Mia Baker. These are some of the most popular folks on YouTube in the golf space. (There are some notable exceptions who I don’t follow or otherwise aren’t worth showing here.) And they all have brief titles, with a lot of punctuation and bold photos.

In fairness (and in recognition that I just wanted to use this GIF), the question is not WHY these all look very similar. The answer is in the subscriptions, the views, the likes. These look like this because it works.

Clearly, we are a bunch of folks who get swayed by BIG BLOCK LETTERS! And short statements and waaaaaacky photos! Seeing Rick Shiels play a great course is kind of awesome. Do I need to see the words TOUGH COURSE! and an arrow pointing at a pot bunker? Maybe I do.

Of course, every video needs a cover image and a title so folks know what they’re looking at. But there’s plenty of alternatives. Here’s No Laying Up, once again:

Here’s a new favorite of mine, TheBossGolfs:

Here’s TheFriedEgg:

I could go on. It’s worth noting that even though NLU and TFE both have very large, passionate fan bases, their videos are nowhere CLOSE to as popular as, say, GoodGood or Rick Shiels. Part of this is the content itself but I have to believe part of it is the promotion and packaging. My other guess is that YouTube feeds on itself - it’s more likely to recommend one of the top videos to someone who watches one than to recommend something that looks different, even if it’s also about golf. Then that leads to more views for the second video, which gets it recommended more, and so on and so forth. Essentially, an ouroboros.

The more time you spend online, the more aware you get of how you are being marketed to, how sites (not just social media) are optimizing the best way to trick you into acting the way you want. This has ALWAYS been true. I worked on a project at one company where we tested out the right color of a button to add something to a cart, and it was - shockingly - clear that one color led to substantially more orders. TikTok is basically set up to engage users in copying certain “challenges” and dances, and it works like a charm WHILE still sending all that data to the company! (Yay?)

I guess awareness matters, but it’s still really interesting to work backwards from things like these YouTube video cards and try to understand the reasoning behind it. Perhaps nobody knows WHY it works, just that it does. And that’s interesting too.