Product Management interview question [Metrics]: As a PM, what metrics would you consider for YouTube homepage?

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I’ll start by describing YouTube — YouTube is a video-sharing platform driven by users, by that I mean there is no particular authority that uploads the content that the users can consume like Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. Users can like, share, and comment on the videos. Users can subscribe to the content creator if they like, they can turn on the Notifications for the content creator to receive any notification like live videos, new videos etc. Users can also add any video to their “watch later” playlist or set reminders for live videos. There is no mention of the type of metrics that we can /want to measure so I’ll list all the metrics that we can measure.

There are two types of Metrics that can be tracked for YouTube -

1. User metrics
2. Technical metrics

User Metrics

User Metrics are the metrics that are associated with the users on the YouTube app. These are -

1. Interaction metrics -
   a. Number of users landing on YouTube homepage
   b. Number of users landing on YouTube homepage but leaving without watching any video
   c. Number of users navigating to different YouTube sections — Explore, Live, Trending, Shorts, Watch later, Your Videos etc.
   d. Number of users leaving the platform after navigating to the above mentioned sections.
   e. Average number of videos being added to “queue” or “watch later”.
   f. Percentage of users interacting with YouTube posts.
   g. Average number of users searching for videos from the Search bar.
   h. Average time spent on the platform.
   i. Average idle time spent on the platform.
   j. Average number of reminders set for Premiere of videos
2. Relevance metrics -
   a. The number of users clicking on the recommended videos (recommended videos don’t have a different tag or section they are just shown to the users on their homepage)
   b. The number of users searching videos by “tags” suggested by YouTube algorithm.
   c. The average number of video tiles containing recommended videos v/s the videos from channels that the user has subscribed to
3. Acquisition metrics -
   a. The number of users landing on YouTube homepage without sign-in (maybe incognito windows)
   b. Average number of videos watched without signing up
   c. The number of users landing on YouTube homepage with sign-in
   d. The sources used by the users to get redirected to YouTube.

Technical metrics

1. Average time taken to load all the content on the YouTube homepage.
2. The number of times users weren’t able to reach the YouTube homepage.
3. The number of times users clicked on a video tile but the video didn’t play.
4. The number of times no reminders were sent to the users for videos premiering soon.
5. Average buffer time for videos.
6. Number of times users were not able to login to their YouTube account.
7. Number of times users were not able to perform operations like — adding to queue, adding to playlist, or watch later.