Читать книгу The YouTube Formula - Derral Eves - Страница 24

To really get down to the details, here's an explanation for exactly how the AI gathers data. Observing metadata starts with the thumbnail. The YouTube AI uses the advanced technology of Google's suite of AI products. It operates a program called Cloud Vision (CV). CV uses optical character recognition (OCR) and image recognition to determine lots of things about a video based on what it finds in the thumbnail. It takes points from each image in the thumbnail and, using billions of data points already in the system, recognizes those images, and feeds that information back into the algorithm. For example, a thumbnail including a close‐up of world‐renowned physicist Stephen Hawking's face is recognized as such in CV, so that video can be “grouped” in the suggested feed along with every other video on YouTube that has been tagged under the Stephen Hawking topic. This is how your videos get discovered and watched.

In addition, CV utilizes a “safety” tool that determines, based on the data it has gathered from the images in your thumbnail, if your video is safe for all audiences to watch, or if it has adult themes, violence, or other questionable content, and it gives a “confidence” score of that determination. This score also reflects how accurately the content matches what the thumbnail shows. This means that you can create a thumbnail, plug it into Cloud Vision, and know before you finalize your video upload how the thumbnail will likely be rated in the system. Using Cloud Vision can help catch something that might, for whatever reason, be flagged as inappropriate on any data point, and therefore can give creators the opportunity to fix it even before it is live. This has cut down on demonetization and other issues creators have had in the past. It can be a very valuable tool to help you stay one step ahead of the problems. CV is not an exact replica of YouTube's safety measures, but it is close enough that creators can get a good idea of how the content will be determined by YouTube. CV might tolerate something YouTube will not, but it is still a sufficient prelaunch tool to utilize.

Figure 4.1 Thumbnail with data points