Product Management

YouTube's Color Discovery Queue

Analyzing the decision-making process

Evolution of the filter option (illustrative — not a comment on the design)

YouTube has been recently experimenting with a discovery queue option of sorting by color. The earliest bubbles I can find for this is 6 months ago (Sept 1 2023). Interestingly, it’s resurfacing again, but with more pop:

Brushing past the whole YouTube PMs are smoking something entirely alien, it helps to take a step back and try to guess why this is happening.

What we know

Let’s establish a couple of things:

First, the scale of YT is enormous — 2.5B active users over the entire year means that a 1% user base is still 25M, which might be the total customer base for most of us here.

Second, Google/YT has been known to favor profit-enhancing features in lieu of user-friendly features. I cannot quote this, but a gander at the mid-tier YT content producer channels and their frequent issues with YTs platforms is enough to come to this conclusion. Add to the fact that they have to make money (more money than yesterday), it is obvious that such strategies are bound to be prioritized, if not outright mandated.

Still, we won’t know what happens in their MBRs/QBRs.