YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, and some of thebest entertainment apps on Androidpride themselves on their content recommendation systems which profile users to understand their preferences and serve content accordingly. YouTube has stayed competitive withShortsand filters for recommendations, but its latest change takes things a step up — content sorted by the primary color in the video.
Content recommendation is designed to keep you interested in an app, which in turn gives said app more chances to serve you ads and help creators make more money. TikTok is known to have one of the best recommendation engines around, but YouTube Shorts is arguably a close second. The longer videos in the Home tab of your app, however, are curated based on yourwatch and search historieson YouTube, besides several other factors.
13 awesome YouTube features you’ll want to try today
YouTube is full of useful tricks
People onLemmy, and the crew at9to5Googlereport seeing a new option to filter stuff on your home feed by the primary color. The prompt appears as a floating card above the first video on the list, and you can choose from one of three primary colors — red, green, and blue. The applied color filter shows up at the very end of the horizontally scrolling list of filters atop the recommended videos in theHometab, and is color-matched too.
The algorithm seems to analyze video thumbnails to find the dominant color. However, the colors don’t tie into moods or content themes, like one would expect them to. That would’ve made sense on YouTube Music, where hues can correspond to moods, and hence music, but is understandably harder to implement on YouTube, given the diversity in content. For example, you couldn’t possibly associate consumer tech videos with any single color. Filtering by color, would, however, help channels which have developed a brand identity around hues, like MKBHD’s (matte) black, red, and white, or TheStradman’s pink, orange, and purple themes.
That said, users on Lemmy rightly wonder why this new experimental filter reeks more of data collection than it does of personalization. We may not immediately realize it, butcolor science ties into purchasing decisionsat a subconscious level, making your color preference valuable information for advertisers. Through this experiment, YouTube could profile user color preferences and help advertisers on its platform tailor their segments to target specific groups of people more effectively.
Thankfully, you aren’t compelled to sort by color (yet) — you could if you find it intriguing, but you’re able to also scroll right past the suggestion. Moreover, we aren’t seeing this roll out widely, so it’s clearly in the experimental stage for Google. The brand isn’t afraid to experiment with new content recommendation systems like thePlay Something button, so, there’s no telling if this will become a full-on YouTube feature prompting creators to alter thumbnails and curated identities associated with specific colors. If that happens, we would love to pick from more than just three colors.
