This YouTube experiment may be why you’re not getting all of your notifications

If you want to stay on top of the latest content from your favorite YouTube channels, you can click on the bell below the player to set up notifications. From the drop-down list, you can choose “All,” “Personalized,” “None,” and “Unsubscribe.” If you recently noticed that you’re not getting push notifications for some of the channels you follow, there’s a reason for that.

Google has announced that it’s currently running an experiment on YouTube. As the company explains, this experiment will affect users who have their notifications set to “All” for the channel they’re subscribed to.

In this test, if you have not recently engaged with a channel, you will cease getting push notifications. However, alerts will still be sent to your notification inbox in the app. Additionally, the content will remain viewable in the Subscriptions feed on both desktop and mobile.

Google adds that nothing will change if you are actively engaged with a channel. Notifications from channels that upload infrequently will also not be impacted by this experiment.

If you’re wondering why Google is running this experiment, the company says it’s to save you from being overwhelmed by notifications:

Viewers often opt in to receive “All” notifications from many channels. When they feel overwhelmed or are no longer interested in a specific channel, instead of updating their subscription and notifications to better reflect their preferences, they simply turn off all notifications from the YouTube app entirely. It’s common for users to have turned on All notifications for a channel, only to have turned off app-level notifications (Creators can see how this impacts their channel in the Audience tab).

The end goal is to prevent users from simply turning all of their notifications off. Turning off all notifications makes it harder for creators to reach their audience. Google sees this as maybe one possible solution for this problem.