Because YouTube doesn't care what you want--YouTube cares what it can monetize.
I suspect that YouTube gets very little money from showing you classical performances but gets lots from showing you the latest "Funny Cat Video".
You are the product, not the customer.
Once you internalize that, stuff that Google does makes sense.
> You are the product, not the customer.
> Once you internalize that, stuff that Google does makes sense.
They published their algorithm. They rank items according to predicted watch-time. The other poster is probably correct, in that many people use these long classical music videos as background music over and over (i.e. high watch time) and so they're highly ranked.
Covington, Paul, Jay Adams, and Emre Sargin. "Deep neural networks for youtube recommendations." Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on recommender systems. 2016.
Nvidia furthermore implemented/released it for TensorFlow, and for their new Recsys engine:
https://ngc.nvidia.com/catalog/resources/nvidia:wideanddeep_...
To be honest, the more I think about it, the more I don’t know what money is YouTube trying to earn.
It’s probably just a dumb algorithm.
I think I heard somewhere that a lot of kid videos rank in the top stratosphere of view counts on YouTube because kids just play stuff on repeat. There's probably a lot of repeat plays going on across YouTube.