The hidden world beneath the shadows of YouTube's algorithm

There's a secret side of YouTube, just beyond the guiding hand of the algorithm – and it’s nothing like what you know. The vast majority of YouTube's estimated 14.8 billion videos have almost never been seen. Until now.

This year marks YouTube's 20th birthday. From its humble beginnings as a venue for amateurs, today YouTube is such a behemoth that the company calls itself the new Hollywood. YouTube is the world's number one TV streaming service, where users clock billions of hours of watching every day. Leading YouTubers regularly outperform big-name studios. For comparison, an estimated 823 million cinema tickets were sold across all of the US and Canada in 2024. Meanwhile, MrBeast's most successful video alone racked up 762 million views, about one watch for every 10 people on earth.  

That's the vision of YouTube the company promotes – slick, professional, entertaining and loud – but from one perspective, it's all a façade.

Through another lens, the essence of YouTube is more like this video from 2020. Before I watched, it had only been seen twice. A man points the camera out of his bedroom window as a flurry breaks out in the dead of winter. "Here it is," he says. "The falling snow." The sound of a TV plays in the background. A bird lands on a nearby fence. 19 minutes go by. Nothing happens.

"The conversations we're having about YouTube are based on an impoverished view of what the platform really is," says Ryan McGrady, the senior researcher in the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US. "When we just focus on what's popular, we miss how the vast majority of people actually use YouTube as uploaders, and overlooking the role it plays in our society."

I spent the last month dipping into one of the first truly random samples of YouTube ever collected outside the company. I saw a side of the internet that sometimes feels lost, one full of pure, unvarnished self-expression. It's an entire world that YouTube's all-seeing algorithm won't show you.

"YouTube isn't just a vehicle for professionals," McGrady says. "We rely on it as the default video arm of the internet. YouTube is infrastructure. It's a critical tool that regular people use to communicate."

To unveil this side of YouTube, McGrady and his colleagues built a tool that dials videos at random. The scraper tried more than 18 trillion potential URLs before it collected a big enough sample for real scientific analysis. Among the findings the researchers estimate that the median video has been watched just 41 times; posts with more than 130 views are actually in the top third of the service's most popular content. In other words, the vast majority of YouTube is practically invisible.

Most of these videos aren't meant for us to see. They exist because people need a digital attic to store their memories. It's an internet unshaped by the pressures of clicks and algorithms – a glimpse into a place where content doesn't have to perform, where it can simply exist.

Twelve years ago, a woman from the US named Emily posted a YouTube video called "sw33t tats". I learned it's even older than that, recorded around 2008. In the video, Emily, who asked to withhold her full name, sits in her college dorm room. She pries her mouth open as her younger sister brings a marker to the inside of Emily's lower lip.

"Stop moving!", her sister yells as she starts to write, the girls barely able to control their laughter. Emily holds her lip open to the camera, and her sister does the same, revealing a sweet tat of her own. But the footage is blurry; whatever these fake tattoos said is lost to time.

Emily, now 34 and living in New York City, forgot this video existed until I asked her about it. "I don't even remember why I uploaded this," she says. "I think wanted to send it to my sister, but I also I had to free up space on my hard drive. I just needed a place to put it. I don't know, it's funny and weird. I'm glad it's still here."

"We tend to assume the reason to use social media is to try to be an influencer, either you're Joe Rogan or you're a failure. But that's the wrong way to think about it," says Ethan Zuckerman, who leads the YouTube research as the director of the University of Massachusetts' Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure.

YouTube tells the BBC it's incorrect to say the platform doesn't let you see videos with low views or content from small channels. The algorithm's job is to help people find the videos they want to watch and that will give them value, YouTube says, and sometimes that does include videos with a small number of views.

"The magic of YouTube is that whether a video has 60 views or six million, people are able to find community, learn a new skill, be entertained, or share their voice with the world," says Boot Bullwinkle, a YouTube spokesperson. "Every channel starts from the same blank slate, from which they can build an audience and grow a business."

Zuckerman and his colleagues weren't the first to go looking for YouTube's underbelly. Between 2009 and 2012, for instance, iPhones included a feature that let users post videos straight to YouTube with a few taps. YouTube reported that mobile uploads jumped 400% a day. Unless people added a custom title, the name for all these videos followed a standard format, which makes them easily searchable over a decade later. A few online tinkerers have explored these videos, which apparently number in the millions. One even built a custom player that cycles through them.

Without the algorithm's recommendations, you'll find that YouTube is a study of the everyday, Zuckerman says, people documenting small moments in their lives and using the available tools to exchange ideas.

In South Asia, for example, Zuckerman says YouTube and similar networks seem to function as a video messaging tool for people with low or no literacy. Most of YouTube comes from outside of the US, in fact. Zuckerman's lab has estimated that over 70% of YouTube videos are in languages other than English. You find fisherman in South America waving from a boat, or two construction workers speaking in Hindi about how much they miss home. Videos like these fall under what he calls "friends and family" content, where comments and interactions all come from people who seem to know the user personally.

"If any of these videos went viral, it would mean something went terribly wrong. That's not what most of YouTube for," Zuckerman says.

Most unwatched YouTube is less entertaining than sw33t tats, which, with respect to Emily, sets a low bar. This stuff is bland enough to melt your brain. A bride gets ready for a photo shoot. A grouchy Korean man rants about politics. Six seconds of a martial arts instructor, devoid of context. Dash camera footage from a car struggling to escape a parking lot. A woman advertises a horse for sale in 2018. Endless, mundane screen recordings of video games – the University of Massachusetts Amhurst study found people playing video games seems to make up almost 20% of YouTube.  

Occasionally, you stumble on something fun, or more often, just plain weird. Three men performatively slapping each other's rear ends to a James Brown song. A woman reviews a brand of pre-sliced bologna (it's "not too bad"). Or take the channel "Space Stuff and Other Stuff", where a kid raps about the planet Neptune and shares his condolences after Queen Elizabeth's passing. The latter falls in the "other stuff" category, apparently.

Some videos are heartrending. I listened to an elderly man describe how he's living in a car on a farm, trading manual labour for a place to stay. There was a moving tribute to a departed cat from her owner, Tyler. "Kiko didn't make it," he says, holding back tears. "It's so darn quiet without her here." A few dozen videos I paused to watch a young ballerina float delicately across a stage, wafting back and forth in front of a hushed crowd.

"As researchers, we spend a lot of time with this stuff. It can be a lot like looking at people's personal snapshots," Zuckerman says. "Most of it's boring, but sometimes it's poignant, even haunting. And every so often, you get something that feels incredibly revealing about how human beings communicate."

But my favourite videos by far came from Bill "The WoofDriver" Hellman. He's a 58-year-old working in real estate just outside of Baltimore, US. But that's not his passion. What Hellman really cares about is his dogs, and the unique way he cares for them. "You've never seen anything like this before," he says in one video. I guarantee that he's right.

Hellman has built over 50 custom-made vehicles that he uses to take his four huskies out for what he calls "urban mushing". He uses social media to document their adventures on the trails of the eastern US. It all looks a bit like the dog sled races of the Iditarod. Except here, the dogs are usually strapped to the side of his various slow-moving contraptions, recumbent bicycles and electric dog-walking carts. By the looks of it Hellman's dogs are thrilled to participate.

He's posted more than 2,400 YouTube videos in the last 14 years, many of which include original rock songs. (Hellman says he's written more than 100 WoofDriver songs, in fact.) He puts in a lot of work, heading out with drones and groups of friends to document his journeys. Hellman's even paid for celebrity endorsements through the platform Cameo to promote his videos. But for all the effort, his channel often gets little traction. Many videos have views in the low double digits.

"I don't get a big audience a lot of the time, but that doesn't bother me. I was just so in love with how happy it made the dogs that at some point I thought 'I gotta share this'," Hellman says. "Maybe it'll inspire someone to take better care of their dogs, but really, I use YouTube like the cloud, so I have a place to document my adventures."

YouTube doesn't pay the bills, and the WoofDriver isn't selling anything – though he's happy to give you the dimensions if you want to build your own urban dog sled. "I just do it because of the joy it brings me," Hellman says.

Random YouTube usually doesn't look like the highly produced videos of the WoofDriver, but he's a good representation in one sense. Like Hellman's content, the majority of these unseen YouTube videos range from neutral to overwhelmingly positive.

The same can't be said for what rises to the top. Research suggests YouTube's algorithm amplifies negativity, reinforces stereotypes and gives users little control over the content they don't want to see. Over the years, YouTube has faced increasing criticism over concerns about hate speech, political extremism and misinformation. Along with other social media platforms, YouTube has been utilised by drug cartels and harnessed by terrorists as a tool for promotion and recruitment.

YouTube says that the company has employed a set of community guidelines since its earliest days to establish what's allowed on the platform. The company says it has redoubled efforts to address its responsibilities. One way YouTube measures its success is through its "violative view rate". In 2017, for every 10,000 views on YouTube, 63-72 views came from content that violated YouTube policies, but today that number has fallen to eight to nine views, according to the company.

YouTube says it gives users several ways to manage YouTube recommendations and search results, such as deleting your Watch History.

When the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure set out to study YouTube, part of the impetus was to document how common hate speech and misinformation is on the platform. "If you go looking for it, you'll find it," McGrady says, but compared to the total body of videos on YouTube it's exceedingly unusual. Still, it doesn't matter how rare a damaging video is if it gets a ton of views, McGrady says, and harmful content remains a serious issue on YouTube.

In recent years, Google has faced a wave of scrutiny from policy makers, with new laws and a mountain of proposed regulations – not to mention a series of antitrust cases. But when the regulatory conversation turns to the videos on YouTube themselves, the focus is almost always on content that goes viral, McGrady says.

This ignores the obligations YouTube should have because, according to McGrady, the company is running a piece of essential infrastructure.

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"The internet is deeply troubled, and we can't ignore the way tech companies are exacerbating those problems," McGrady says. "What makes me hopeful is that when you find a way to look at how people are really using the web, a lot of it still feels like the early internet. It's expression, communication, connection. Fundamentally, it's a place where regular people share themselves and do wonderful things."

The YouTube we talk about – the one full of celebrities, scandals and manufactured virality – only tells part of the story. The majority exists in quiet moments, in shaky camera work and voices meant for no one in particular.  I watched hundreds of these videos. Everything one of them is public, but it's also clear that most people didn't upload this content for strangers. It was like being let in on a secret, a sprawling, uncurated documentary of human life. But watching it also felt like work compared to the doomscroll-inducing entertainment you get from the algorithm. Eventually, I closed my tabs and headed back to the YouTube homepage, back to the polished world of the corporate internet.

* Thomas Germain is a senior technology journalist for the BBC. He's covered AI, privacy and the furthest reaches of internet culture for the better part of a decade. You can find him on X and TikTok @thomasgermain.

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