Why Are Youtube Search Results Broken? This One Man Single-handedly Uploaded 2 Million Videos

By Ana Dascalescu

Posted on May 25, 2022

Do Youtube search results frustrate you to no end?

Youtuber DistroTube shows how one man single-handedly might collapse YouTube’s entire infrastructure.

In his video essay, he shows how Roel Van de Paar, a man with not even 80K subscribers, has uploaded 2 million videos to Youtube, averaging a new video every few seconds. 

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To put that into perspective, the current estimation is that Youtube has around 800 million content – and one man alone uploaded 2 million of them.

Thanks to him and others like him, who upload unreal amounts of content to YouTube, search results can be littered or manipulated so that your specific query makes you wade through dozens of unrelated or spammy videos.

According to DistroTube, Van de Paar uploads videos “tech related, programming related, the kind of questions you might access on StackOverflow”.

All of his videos have a thumbnail with the question a user searches, a photo of Van de Paar, then some auto-generated video based on scraped content elsewhere.

The entire process is so streamlined, he uploads at a rate of almost one video per second, effectively spamming the Youtube search algorithm to get ad revenue.

So, how does he manage this output?

DistroTube speculates that he probably set up some cheap servers to take questions from StackOverflow, then turn them into videos with just text information on them. For a three-minute video of such low quality, a computer would only take one minute in rendering it.

For his efforts, Roel Van Der Paar got 1 million views in the last month on his channel. 

However, because ad revenue differs from content creator to content creator, and Youtube doesn’t publish those fees, it’s unclear just how much money he makes on those videos.

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Why Are Youtube Search Results Broken? This One Man Single-handedly Uploaded 2 Million Videos