Sometimes if you catch a new video soon after it's been uploaded you can see it's in a state before the recommendations have been generated, the few times I've seen it happen the recommendations were entirely kids videos with vibrant thumbnails and strange names.
I have no idea how youtube gets it's recommendations when this happens, but if it's some sort of randomish fallback list, I can easily believe that cheap, mass produced kids content is a huge fraction of youtube uploads/views.
I have no idea how youtube gets it's recommendations when this happens, but if it's some sort of randomish fallback list, I can easily believe that cheap, mass produced kids content is a huge fraction of youtube uploads/views.