I watched a video by William Gourley (a friend of friends) recently, and here are the suggested videos to its right on YouTube.
There is only one that is actually related to what I saw. The rest are completely irrelevant.
In the olden days, YouTube would at least attempt to show you related videos in the hope that they would pique your interest and you’d stay on the site longer. It seems those days are gone.
Which is good. I’m not complaining, I’m merely observing. It’s been like this for a few weeks now, maybe more (since I don’t frequent the site that much). Hopefully, it means people are freed from getting stuck on YouTube for hours on end.
Though I wouldn’t know Google to pass up hits—they even make doorway pages to notch up extra ones, something they penalize the rest of us for. The logical explanation for these video links’ appearance is—as much as Big Tech does stupid things with amazing regularity—that this junk captures people’s attention and has proved to be more successful than actual related fare.
If that’s the case, then that’s disappointing that people can be so easily sucked in to videos that will fall well short of expectations and simply waste their time. The clickbait ads at the bottom of news pages—even we used to see them at the bottom of our pages—never worked, so has something changed in 2025?
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