A lot of Youtube channels are reporting declining viewership lately.
EX1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpVnx4_yqTo
EX2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0tmhEtVJE
Fun times. Looks like a lot of channels are seeing a decline not just Linus. Hes just the latest to talk about it.
Then I saw this article as well and thought I would share.
Anyone here youtube creators? Are you seeing the same thing, a general downturn in viewership?
Everyone here is speculating about their content, but the simple answer is YouTube just changed how they count the view number. The change basically happened overnight, so it’s not some slow attrition of views. They said in the WAN Show that while the view count halved, the number of likes hasn’t changed (the view/like ratio doubled), and the revenue they earned hasn’t changed (CPM doubled). All of this points that the same number of humans are watching, but what counts as a view in the “views” number just changed.
*the view/ like ratio
doubledhalvedThe views halved, the likes stayed the same. So the ratio of likes to views is now higher.
Yes, likes/views is higher but you originally said views/likes is higher.
How does that even work? If someone viewed the video then they viewed the video. Are they simply not counting people who basically clicked by accident or who only watched the first 30sec before deciding that they didn’t actually want to watch the video?
Even before this drop in views, the rule was you have to watch a video for at least 30 seconds before it counts as a view, as a way to combat clickbait where people instantly bounce from a video. Maybe they have changed this further? Or they change some kind of bot detection?
I wonder if it has something to do with how they count users with ad blockers.
It could even be something “innocent” about how ad-blockers have started to interact with the site as YouTube ramps up their anti-adblock measures and the ad-blockers have to change how they work. Like maybe the ad-blockers have started blocking the JavaScript callback that logs the views.
thats probably it, the influencers always remind people adblocking or not subscribing hurts thier channel. plus if your adblocking you arnt exposed to multiple ads in a single video.
wonder how google is considering what count as a view? you have to watch it a certain number of minutes? you must be exposed to ads for X amount of time?