Today we are talking about the most important traffic source on YouTube. If you see a million views on a video, that means it is probably on YouTube's recommended list.

In this article, we will show you how to get to the recommendations on YouTube.

What are recommendations on YouTube

These are the videos that YouTube offers you based on your interests. Recommendations consist of two elements: the Homepage and the Recommended section on the right side when viewing videos.

How to get YouTube to recommend your videos

So we have four things that are particularly important:

• A number of views per video. If you cannot reach them via the existing audience, Adwords traditionally comes to the rescue.
• High clickability (CTR)
• High video retention
• Video optimization

How algorithm functions:

1. When your video gets some YouTube views, it gets in the recommendations.
2. At this stage, YouTube looks at retention and CTR compared to other videos.
3. If the numbers do not drop, YouTube broadens the public for recommendations. Thus the growth of the views occurs, YouTube constantly compares the performances with those of its competitors.

If the video does not lose in the face of competition, over time, it will start to be shown to an ever-expanding audience.

Recommendations work like this:

• Initially, you are shown to a loyal audience who watch each of your videos.
• After a day or so, when all the faithful subscribers have watched you, you're going to be shown to your regular viewers. They do not watch every single one of your videos, just the best ones.
• After a couple of weeks of active recommendations, all viewers who are at least a little bit familiar with the channel will be finished. The algorithm will gather new viewers. Whether they like the video or not depends entirely on the quality of the content.

You can get recommended new and old recommended videos. New is definitely easier, but old can start growing. The main thing is that the video should be of high quality. For maximum effect, you can change the preview/title and reoptimization.

The right way to gain first views is from a loyal audience. Also, you can buy YouTube views from real people to grow this metric.