How would you increase the frequency of YouTube (visits/week/user)?

By user, we are referring to the people who are coming to the platform and watching/consuming any type of content. We are not talking about the creators. à Yes

These users can be logged in or non-logged in right? à Yes

If on average a user is coming to YouTube 5 times a week, we want to increase that number. à Yes

We are not really considering for how long they are engaging per week or per session.

Is it for desktop or mobile? à For both

Has there been any user research done that I should be aware of? à None

I will structure my answer by discussion this specific objective with the higher level goal of YouTube. Next, I will consider the users and their pain points in the existing use of YouTube which is restricting them from coming to YouTube a higher number of times per week. Then, I will brainstorm a few solutions to improve the current scenario.

We all know that the mission of YouTube is to give everyone a voice and show them the world and that the world is a better place when we listen, share, and build community through our stories. For people to listen share and build community, they need to devote time and attention to YouTube. There are multiple social media platforms, video streaming platforms – all wanting a share of the users’ limited time of 24 hours/day or 168 hours/week and trying to provide better quality content and higher levels of engagement/satisfaction so that the users tend to spend most of their time on their platforms. Similarly, YouTube needs to provide good engaging content and maintain good user engagement to increase the number of visits/user/week.

Now, lets look at some of the user profiles:

• People coming to YouTube to watch cooking videos in detail while cooking and learn the craft
• Similarly, people coming to hone their gardening skills or to learn repairing of some household items
• Children, working professionals and job seekers coming to the platform to understand some concepts or learn some courses/skills
• People are coming to the platform to watch some travel vlogs before going on some trips
• Folks are coming in to get some entertainment to pass the time
• Folks are coming in to spend time by watching something useful and important

As you can see above, YouTube has a very wide user base. So, before prioritizing any specific user group because, lets look at the common current pain points or some of the barriers which can be removed

1. Find more engaging content on other platforms – for shorter videos, visit Instagram or Tiktok and for watching movies, series, visit Netflix, Amazon Prime, Jio Cinema etc
2. If pulled into some work, people forget to come back and continue watching YouTube
3. Some interesting content is not available in the language I am comfortable in
4. There are not many avenues for people to engage much with the content (other than reacting and commenting and sharing through other competitors’ channels – FB, WhatsApp and X)

I will try to attack the latter 3 pain points to increase user engagement and satisfaction levels as making content more engaging need not really translate into nuding them to return to the platform higher number of times.

Solutions:

1. When people leave the platform abruptly watching a video or watching a series of videos – send them notifications on their Gmail account after an hour or the next day similar time so that they tend to come to the platform and watch
2. If there is a pattern in the YouTube usage of specific users, they can be reminded or notified to come back and consume more content as per their pattern
3. Most YouTube content should be made available in regional/local languages so that people not comfortable with listening to “English” audio can still enjoy content
4. If young adults or children are learning some courses, they can be asked if they are interested to learn with their friends and some sort of gamification can be done to enhance their learning as well as nudge the friends who are not regularly logging in to watch the videos
5. If any user who watches some cooking videos/gardening videos /painting videos and tend to share with their friends – any time they don’t, people can be asked if they are interested and the same can be shared with their friends nudging them to come back to YouTube and watch the content
6. If people have subscribed to certain channels, when new videos are added by the channel creators, the subscribers can again receive some notification on their emails of the new videos which they can watch and enjoy/learn

In terms of implementation, solutions 1 2 and 5 can be implemented initially as the effort of implementation seems to be low and is applicable for all users and a direct way of measuring if people are returning back to the platform more frequently.

Next, the solution 6 can be implemented à if people are subscribed to large number of channels, for those folks, notifications should be sent based on the channels which they visit not very frequently and not very rarely.

Since, solution 4 is for some specific user base, depending on user research and market size, a decision can be taken whether to implement it.

Solution 3 should be implemented from overall perspective of increasing engagement levels.

Please note that the notifications can be YouTUbe app notifications on mobile as well.

2 factors need to be kept in mind:

a) Users should not receive too many notifications every week that they get irritated and visit the platform even less

b) As per some country policies, users might have to be asked if they opt-in for notifications

Periodically, user feedback should be taken to analyze whether people are finding these notifications useful as well.