YouTube usage has dropped by 50%. What would you do?

Consumer
- # sessions per user per day
- Dwell time
- Search results accuracy
- # videos watched per session
- % videos completed
- % videos saved
  - Avg video legnth watched per session
  - % videos completed by logging later
- % videos reacted by likes/ shares/ comments
- DAU/ WAU
- NPS
Creator
- # sessions per user per day per user
- # videos uploaded per day per user
- Avg views per videos per user
- Avg likes/ shares/ comments per video per user
- DAU/ WAU
- NPS

Hypothesis -

Internal factors -

Did we release any new product feature?
Did we release any bug fix/ tech improvements?
Did we change the search/ view algorithm for content listing?
Any infrastructure issues?

External factors?

Any seasonality effects?
Any new competitor offerings?
Any changes in the ad policy/ pricing policy?
Any internet outage issues?
Any govt policy regulations?
Any customer complaints?

Validations -

Internal issues - Any of the listed issues could contribute to this steep decline in user engagement. So, we need to evalaute each of these changes immediately and identify if there is an underlying issue

External issues - Seasonality effects normally result in gradual decline and not such steep in nature. Same is true for policy change issues. In case of competitor offering, based on the quantum of relevance of the content, the decline can vary, but 50% drop sounds too big a drop to be coming from competitor offering. Coming to internat outage or govt. regulations, since this is a global drop, it is highly unlikely to have such things happening at the same time across the globe

So, it seems more to be an internal issue related to product/ algo/ infra issues.

Solutioning -

Short term - Revert any changes done immediately and inform all the users about the same and continue to evalaute the above listed metrics to check for normalcy again.

Long term -

We need to analyze the user complaints, understand the issue raised, revisit our backlog and reprioritize the issues based on impact and effort. We need to keep fixing the issues and release them after thorough testing with proper communication for all our users.

Parva Shrivastava · Answer 2 · 2024-06-20T16:22:57+0000

This will need additional information. Let's identify if:

1. How is usage defined and calculated? What does it mean when we say usage has dropped by 50%?

2. Is the drop of 50% sudden or gradual? What is the time period being considered for to measure this value?

3. Is it a common occurence that usage drops by 50%? How does usage trend fluctuate?

4. Is it on YouTube app or web? If app then if it specific to any platform like Android or Apple.

5. Is it confined to any geographic region?

I will ask further clarifying questions that can be categorized as:

A. External factors

Has there been regulatory action, or any negative news concerning YouTube?
Did any competitior launch any new feature that competes with YouTube?
Has there been any sudden price change by internet providers that can be detrimental to YouTube's consumption?
Is this usage drop limited to YouTube or other media streaming companies faced something similar?

B. Internal factors

Was there any rollout of any new feature recently?
Was there any downtime of service availability?
Is there any increase in latency?
Was there any technical glitch that cause malfunction like playing of videos or user not being able to access YouTube

Based on complete analysis of above questions, we can take corrective approach to address the issue.