Liyuan Yin, a marketing specialist at The Dialogue Group, is a YouTuber whose channel is in beauty and fashion session. She studied at Georgetown University graduate school of Culture, Communication, and Technology program from 2014 to 2016. And in 2015, she has worked in China in Entgroup, a leading research center of China’s entertainment industry. Before that, she has also worked in the marketing related industry and is familiar with data analytical work. In 2014, she started her YouTube channel in beauty and fashion session as part-time interest, and now her channel has 1050 subscribers. Her videos are mostly about her daily life and how to do makeup. Having become a professional YouTuber for 3 solid years, she has deep experience with YouTube about how it works, and familiar with its recommendation system. In this video, we interviewed her about her experience with YouTube.
Transcript
C=Crystal
V= Xiaoran (Valentina)
C: My name is Liyuan Yin and I have a beauty and fashion YouTube channel with 1055 followers. I joined YouTube on April 2014. And I remember that at that time I just received CCT’s offer, I was so excited to start a new journey in a new country, so I was wondering if there is any way that I can learn more about the culture like what people are really doing in their daily life.
V: What kind of videos would YouTube recommend to you?
C: Since I started to be a content creator myself, I noticed that the more I watched the beauty and fashion videos, the more I will receive videos of the same category by (the) YouTube recommendation system. And usually I will just let these videos play by itself, so to be honest, I will keep watching the recommended videos by YouTube.
V: Have you experimented with any ways to get your YouTube videos promoted?
C: I’m a marketing specialist myself, and YouTube marketing is a major part of my daily work, so I know how it works. Because of that I would like to be more cautious in spending money on YouTube channel. And another reason is that I started the channel purely out of interest so I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself, whether it’s mentally or physically, like the money. So I didn’t try any way to promote my videos.
V: Does YouTube actually offer content creators ways in terms of like paying to buy plans to get your video bumped up in the recommendations?
C: They do have. You can choose to promote your videos and advertisements appearing on other YouTubers’ videos like in the beginning, or in the middle, or at the end. I have helped my clients to launch their YouTube campaigns and firstly they need to upload a video, and after that we can choose which channels or which group of people to target to promote their ad videos.
V: Do you remember how much these cost?
C: It really depends on the viewings, the clicks, like the click-through rate. But there are also options to control the daily budget.
V: Do the actual fans that show up in the comment section is the same as your targeted audiences ?
C: I started the channel for fun. I really wanted to share my thoughts and tips on beauty and fashion with people who are interested in makeup, skincare, and dressing up nicely. I didn’t do any research on my fans’ profiles, so I can’t tell if the actual follower group is precisely the same as I expected, but I can say that based on who has interacted with me often, they exactly what I expected at first.
V: Do you mean that YouTube actually offers you information on your subscribers?
C: Yeah, I can see their profiles but when you build your profile you can choose to publicly show some parts and to hide the other parts so it’s up to you, there’s nothing private information that will be shown to me.
V: Do you think human factors or bias influence YouTube recommendations?
C: Since I have become a YouTuber, at first I was satisfied with all these videos that YouTube recommended to me. But then I realized that how much time I have wasted non-stopping watching all these videos that can only reinforce my existing viewings of the world. This is because of the YouTube’s algorithm, the watch time is always the most important, and this is the bias that I can notice.
V: What are your recommendations to YouTube?
C: So I hope they can improve the diversity of videos the system recommends to the audience, and I also wish they can take more efforts on manual video reviewing. And as I know YouTube is a Google-owned company, and Google has a great team to manually review all these advertisements uploaded, so I hope YouTube can take more efforts on manual video reviewings, so that they can, like delete the fake news (and) discourage videos which contain violence.
V: Could you comment on your reaction to the recent shooting at YouTube?
C: Youtube does not have the perfect recommendation algorithm and it is not flawless. But my point is, under no circumstances should one person hurt anyone simply because he or she is angry. So I think this is her personal issue (and) I think it is her own business. Youtube is just an excuse that she can come up with to justify her behavior. So I don’t think people should blame Youtube’s recommendation system. But in another word, YouTube definitely needs to improve their algorithms.
THE END
