How ranking works

YouTube orders videos by what keeps people watching. We order them by what helps students study. Each lesson gets a score from 0 to 100 built only from Merit's own signals, recomputed as students use Merit. When two lessons tie, the one with more YouTube views comes first.

Topic fit

50%

How squarely the video covers the topic, from its title and description. A focused 8-minute lesson on the chain rule beats a 2-hour unit review that mentions it.

Helpfulness

35%

Merit students mark videos as helpful (or not) for studying. Votes are smoothed so a lesson with three votes isn't ranked on luck, and one with three thousand is ranked on what students said. We show a "% helpful" figure once at least 5 students have voted.

Saves

15%

How often Merit students save a lesson to watch again before an exam.

Sort it your way

Every feed and topic page can also be sorted by most helpful, most viewed, newest, shortest, longest, and filtered by length.

What we don't do

Channels can't pay for placement.
Songs, parodies, and ASMR aren't lessons, so they rank below real ones. They're still there, and sorting by views treats them like any other video.
We don't turn YouTube's likes, views, or comments into scores of our own. View counts are shown exactly as YouTube reports them.
We don't rank on thumbnails or click-through rate.
Your individual activity is never shown to other students. Only totals feed into rankings.

See it in action on Chain Rule or Champa Rice.