Does the country selection cause YT to deliver videos more to a local audience?

[waterprism]

Hi. Would just like to find out about something regarding the country selection you have to make under Advanced - Account Information to enable monetization.

Does that selection affect the geolocation of your videos in any way? When I select my country, will YouTube algorithmically decide that my videos are more suited to people from my country even though my videos are in fact intended for a worldwide English-speaking audience?

And does YouTube do that in general, sort of automatically decide your videos are more intended for your home audience based on your IP or on that country selection above and then skew delivery of your videos more to people from your home country even though the videos are intended for a worldwide audience?

Thanks.

 

[KidsCorner]

I think it depends more on the language you pick for your videos, at least that's what it looks like for my channel. I'm hardly getting views from my country, most comes from the US and the UK for me.

 

[KiddieToysReview]

I asked a similar qn to our Yt brand manager a little while ago. She stated that if a channel's country is changed, there would likely be an affect on traffic, although she could not say how drastic the effect would be. This leads me to believe there is at least some proportion of traffic that is determined by the location you set for your channel. The physical location of the upload machine is not used at all as far as I can tell. Yt also determines the location to serve your videos based on your video language and the original language of t/d. If you have done translations of your t/d and CC, your video will be served more to those countries.

 

[MrWhiskers]

I asked a similar qn to our Yt brand manager a little while ago. She stated that if a channel's country is changed, there would likely be an affect on traffic, although she could not say how drastic the effect would be. This leads me to believe there is at least some proportion of traffic that is determined by the location you set for your channel. The physical location of the upload machine is not used at all as far as I can tell. Yt also determines the location to serve your videos based on your video language and the original language of t/d. If you have done translations of your t/d and CC, your video will be served more to those countries.

Didn't actually know this, so I guess if I would want to broaden my audience I can get someone to make my CC in different languages. I would like to see this tested to see what happens.

 

[KiddieToysReview]

Didn't actually know this, so I guess if I would want to broaden my audience I can get someone to make my CC in different languages. I would like to see this tested to see what happens.

Yt will auto-translate it for you, just click the selection. Not as good as a native speaker doing it, but much quicker and cheaper.

 

[Misha's Toys & More]

I wanted to test this too so I post in 2 languages, now 90% of our traffic is from our home country. I'm guessing there's so much more competition in English videos so it was just easier to start off at home. I would like to get more international views in the future though...

 

[waterprism]

Thanks, everyone, for the thoughts. Guess I'm left a little bit confused still. My home country where I'm based isn't even tangentially related to my content; wouldn't want that country selection dropdown to somehow skew delivery of my videos to a local audience just because YT thinks they're giving creators some kind of a (in my case, unhelpful) local algorithmic boost.

I suppose one could look at, say, Pewdiepie's channel. I would guess he selected Sweden for that dropdown (if that dropdown existed at the time) and yet his channel is obviously massively global. But then again, did the YT algo at first concentrate on delivering his videos to a Swedish audience and then only over time begin to realize that his audience is global as his channel began to kind of organically go viral? Does one perhaps have to struggle at first against that selection?