A Strategic Analysis of YouTube’s Monetization Algorithm: The Interplay of Ad Pods, Clickbait and User Experience

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-670-8_6How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Algorithmic Amplification; User Experience; Clickbait; Ad Pods; Algorithmic Precarity; Psychological Reactance

Abstract

This paper investigates the complex relationship between YouTube’s strategic optimization for user engagement and the platform’s monetization imperatives. Our analysis demonstrates how the platform’s core optimization function actively drives creator and user behavior into a negative feedback loop. In its pursuit of maximizing ad revenue, the algorithm fosters an environment where content creators adopt strategies like clickbait to achieve visibility, while users are subjected to increasingly intrusive advertising mechanics. This dynamic degrades the user experience, leading to irritation, psychological reactance, and fatigue. The analysis reveals that the interplay between the platform’s technical architecture, creator incentives, and user reactions creates a self-reinforcing cycle that the system is not incentivized to break. This cycle generates significant socioeconomic precarity for creators and carries broader societal consequences, including the erosion of trust in information and the deterioration of public discourse, by systematically subordinating content quality and user well-being to platform revenue goals.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Herman Tusiadi
AU  - Elsie Elsie
AU  - Agustinus Purna Irawan
AU  - Haris Maupa
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/13
TI  - A Strategic Analysis of YouTube’s Monetization Algorithm: The Interplay of Ad Pods, Clickbait and User Experience
BT  - Proceedings of the fourteenth International Conference on Entrepreneurship and Business Management 2025 (ICEBM 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 70
EP  - 78
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-670-8_6
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-670-8_6
ID  - Tusiadi2026
ER  -