At a panel at Vidcon 2026, YouTube’s Senior Director of Growth and Discovery, Todd Beaupré, said something that’s been making the rounds this week: “When you have a question about the algorithm, I encourage you to replace the word ‘algorithm’ in your question with ‘audience.’”

He went on to explain that people spend so much time thinking about when they post, or what the algorithm is going to pick up, but they forget that the #1 thing YouTube looks at to decide whether to show a video is how the audience reacts to it.

This, of course, got a lot of backlash from creators. They pointed to nearly identical videos where one flopped and the other got a million views, or once-popular channels that suddenly seemed to lose favour in the algorithm.

I’ll admit I’ve had the same frustration with how YouTube serves up their videos. In our small sample size, we’ve had several videos take off, picking up tens of thousands of views, while others that I was sure would be successful get served to nearly no one. I’m sure we’ve all had the same feeling with algorithms across all of the major social channels.

It’s worth noting that it’s in Beaupre’s best interest to tell us the truth. He’s the head of Growth and Discovery, after all, so his success is tied to creators’ ability to get lots of growth on their channels.

So What?

Maybe he’s right. Maybe the thing that makes content distribution so unpredictable is not the algorithms, but human behaviour.

Look at any other form of media, from movies to books, music, etc. Producers effectively bet millions of dollars on being able to predict the next big hit, and they are constantly wrong.

The advantage we have over all of those big budget media formats is that we don’t have to make major investments in a book launch or a film premiere. When an Instagram Reel or YouTube Short flops, we can simply roll up our sleeves and try again.

Plus, we have access to incredible data that tells us who’s watching, and when they’re losing interest.

Are there times when it seems the algorithms are playing tricks on us? Absolutely. But for the most part, the platforms want to get great content in front of as many people as possible. So rather than spending our time focusing on how to game the system, it makes much more sense for us to focus on the other side of the equation: the audience.