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. YouTube views never add to the score; they only break exact ties.
What goes into a lesson's score
100 points- Topic fit 45%
- Helpfulness 20%
- Length for one topic 15%
- Made for today's course 10%
- Saves 10%
Topic fit
45%
How squarely the lesson teaches this topic, at a high school level. A lesson whose title names the topic beats one that only mentions it, unit reviews and roundups rank below focused lessons, and college lectures (like multivariable calculus) or other countries' exam courses are pushed down.
Helpfulness
20%
Merit students mark lessons as helpful (or not) after watching. 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.
Length for one topic
15%
A focused 4 to 20 minute lesson scores highest. Full-unit reviews and multi-hour lectures cover much more than one topic, so they rank lower but stay findable.
Made for today's course
10%
Lessons made before a course's current College Board framework (or the digital SAT) may teach what's no longer on the exam, so they score lower.
Saves
10%
How often Merit students save a lesson to watch again before a test.
Editors' picks and what we leave out
On the most-studied topics, Merit's editors watch the top candidates and pin up to three lessons first, marked "Merit pick." Everything below them is ranked by the score.
Some videos never appear at all: ads, hashtag-farmed clips, and lessons that aren't in English (outside the world language courses).
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.