YouTube is developing a new approach to content recommendations through primary color, offering an even more immersive experience.
YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, and some of the best entertainment apps on Android all pride themselves on their content recommendation systems that profile users to understand their preferences and serve content accordingly. YouTube has remained competitive with Shorts and recommendation filters, but its latest change goes a step further — content sorted by the primary color in the video.
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Content recommendation is designed to keep you engaged in an app, which in turn gives the app more opportunities to show you ads and help creators make more money. TikTok is known for having one of the best recommendation systems, but YouTube Shorts is arguably a close second. The longer videos in your app’s “Home” tab, however, are selected based on your YouTube watch and search history, among several other factors.
The folks at Lemmy and the team at 9to5Google are reporting that they’re seeing a new option to filter content in the “Home” tab based on primary color. The window appears as a floating card above the first video in the list, and you can choose between three primary colors — red, green, and blue. The applied color filter appears at the very bottom of the horizontal scrolling filter list above the suggested videos in the “Home” tab, and it’s also color-matched.
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It appears that the algorithm analyzes video thumbnails to find the dominant color. However, the colors are not associated with emotional moods or content themes, as one might expect. This would make sense on YouTube Music, where colors can be mapped to emotions and therefore music, but is understandably more difficult to implement on YouTube, given the variety of content. For example, you wouldn’t be able to associate consumer technology videos with any single color. Filtering by color, however, would help channels that have developed a corporate identity around colors, such as MKBHD’s (matte) black, red, and white, or TheStradman’s pink, orange, and purple themes.
However, users on Lemmy are rightly wondering why this new experimental filter smacks more of data collection than personalization. We may not realize it right away, but the science of color is tied to purchasing decisions on a subconscious level, making your color preferences valuable information for advertisers. Through this experiment, YouTube could profile users’ color preferences and help advertisers on its platform tailor their segments to target specific groups of people more effectively.
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Luckily, you’re not forced to sort by color. You can if you find it interesting, but you can also scroll right past the suggestion. Plus, we don’t see this change being widely implemented, so it’s clearly still in the experimental stage for Google. The company isn’t afraid to experiment with new content recommendation systems like the “Play Something” button, so there’s no way to know if this will become a fully functional YouTube feature that encourages creators to change their thumbnails and carefully crafted identities associated with specific colors. If it does, we’d like to see more than just three colors to choose from.
Information source: androidpolice.com
