8 ms·

YouTube views are down (don't panic)

123 points by nfriedly 1y ago

nfriedly 1y ago
I see a similar thing happen with npm stats occasionally, where the downloads count for popular packages will cut in half. Although I think it's just unreliable infrastructure there - it's usually back to the expected level a day or two later.
procaryote 1y ago
Isn't this just youtube cracking down on adblock? They have a plethora of ways to make the app and website suck for non-paying users now, including and not limited to: * faking an interruption when starting to play * random errors mid-play * no longer playing on hover on-web or in-app I've just taken that as a good signal I should read more books instead, but I imagine it kills view-counts
- kamikazeturtles 1y ago
  Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there. I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. I doubt their crackdown on adblock users would affect view counts that much, but I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence and a few Google searches
  - RajT88 1y ago
    I mostly watch on desktop. Their current anti-adblock strategy does get past what I am using - but I have a different clever workaround. When the ad starts, just refresh the page. It will act as though it's already played the ads, even if it is an unskippable ad.
    - monknomo 1y ago
      This reminds of something that has been bugging me on mobile. I click a video by accident. It begins to play the ad before the video. I have to watch the add before I can go back to looking for what I wanted to watch. eugh
  - ajross 1y ago
    > Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there. I continue to find it amazing just How Big the impact of "advertising" is in the brain of a median HN commenter vs. the attention paid (almost none) to it by citizens at large. Like, that Liberty Mutual Duck is just weird to most folks, but to us it's somehow the greatest assault on our freedom imaginable?
    - djmips 1y ago
      duck?
      - ajross 1y ago
        It was a riff on the AFLAC duck from a few decades back, a similarly hated campaign that played everywhere and that we all survived just fine. Maybe the humor was bad. But the point stands: advertising has been with us since the dawn of "media" and no one cares outside our oddball bubble. People sat through ads on their sitcoms in the 70's and they sit through the annoying insurance birds, and... who cares? It's only here that people somehow believe that contra all evidence, somehow advertising on the internet is a unique affront to all that is holy. When... it's just ads!
        discostrings 1y ago
        In the 70s the ads were a one-way broadcast. Now the ads watch you back. Far beyond the time wasted, they're an invasion of privacy.
    - Our_Benefactors 1y ago
      It’s because making the choice of not being served ads is increasingly a technical challenge/hobby undertaking. Nerds like challenges. Other people are unaware it’s even a choice they have.
      - tavavex 1y ago
        You're right, but it's not because it's a challenge that we like, it's not like this is something enjoyable. Nerds do it through gritted teeth, it's annoying to bypass all of that. They just know it's a possibility and care about it enough to pursue it. Most people don't know and don't care.
  - Figs 1y ago
    > I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. This is not a safe assumption. Personally, I've stopped using YouTube entirely for entertainment; the level of annoyance dealing with it vs the value I get out of it is just not worth it any more. I'm doing other things with my time now instead of watching YouTube. Some of that is watching video on other platforms, and some of that is spending time on other hobbies instead.
    - gibspaulding 1y ago
      Yeah, UBO and Sponsor Block are still working for me but if they stop I’ll be gone. I haven’t browsed Reddit since I switched to iOS and lost access to RedReader.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    > I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. Not sure if I'm typical (probably not!) but I never disable the ad blocker; if a video or site doesn't work with an ad blocker, I just move on.
- b112 1y ago
  Any time I have any of those issues, I entirely attribute to the website. I can't imagine the average user thinking otherwise. If youtube is doing any of those things, instead of just saying "pay", they're dumb as dirt. Why would I want to pay for what is perceived as a junky, buggy site?
  - nmeofthestate 1y ago
    Maybe YouTube consider it unlikely for an adblock user to ever buy premium, so they just try to drive such viewers away instead.
    - kelnos 1y ago
      I'm an adblock user and I do pay for Premium, so there's at least one of us. I do genuinely want to watch YouTube videos, but I don't want to have to deal with anti-adblock measures ruining the experience. So I pay. Which is reasonable, no? Either I pay with cash or by allowing myself to be manipulated into buying things I don't want or need. If those are the choices, I choose not to pay with my attention.
    - b112 1y ago
      Yes, but that's the "dumb as dirt" part. You never, ever "drive users away". Ever. A person with no money now (a college student on a tight budget?) may in a few years have a healthy income. A single person may be struggling, then find a partner and collectively they have more income. People's income levels change. Training them that your product is utter and complete garbage, means those people won't ever become customers. Ever. The truth of the matter is, that just like their search, every other aspect of Google's infra is in a state of decay. Youtube is slow and takes forever to start now. Google search is pathetic, takes forever to give results in some circumstances, and randomly locks people out with captchas. The Google of today must be complete chaos internally, it's the only explanation I can see. If the problem is AI, you never give up a cash cow whilst you pivot. You don't let what you have fall to tatters, whilst you pursue some other goal. Especially when Google has the scope and capability to maintain and yet also pursue other avenues. I suspect, but could be entirely wrong here, that Google has pulled key people, drivers, movers, which are a rare breed -- out of key positions in all of their structure and focused them on something else. But anyhow.
- port11 1y ago
  That seems to be about it. Our Tizen TV doesn't block the ads and we don't get any issues with playback. As soon as I'm on Safari or Brave with an adblocker, YouTube is teeth-grinding irritating. I checked my screen time and I'm down to about 15 minutes per week, whereas before I'd watch my subscriptions for about 2h per week. Can't say I miss it.
gwbas1c 1y ago
I wonder if some of Youtube's behavior was responsible for inflating the number of views. For example, after searching on my phone, some of the videos in the search results would play silently without me selecting the video. Then, the video would show up in my history. I also wonder if they aren't counting short (under 10 seconds) views of longer videos?
- nkrisc 1y ago
  This happened all the time. Scrolling through videos would cause them to start playing inline in the feed view if your finger lingered a millisecond too long. So I have all these videos I’ve accidentally “watched” while trying to scroll past them.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- techjamie 1y ago
  This can be disabled. Go to your profile in the app, then to settings in the upper right. Under General there's a setting called Playback in Feeds.
  - gwbas1c 1y ago
    Yes, I turned that off immediately.
usefulcat 1y ago
I used to watch YT pretty frequently, though I've never bothered to sign in. This is via the Roku app, as opposed to via a browser. Starting sometime within the past month or so, they changed the interface so that instead of having many rows of suggestions, now it only has a single row, making it more work for me to find something I want to watch. As a result I watch it much less now. Prior to this change, I was considering paying for it to skip the ads. You could argue that since I've already given them lots of info about myself (I'm watching it over GFiber after all) I may as well just sign in, but this level of intentional enshittification really rubs me the wrong way.
nntwozz 1y ago
RedLetterMedia dropped a video about this: Obligatory "YouTube is Broken" Video https://youtu.be/q5-b7v6EIzc https://youtu.be/q5-b7v6EIzc
teiferer 1y ago
As a user, I noticed a drastic change around that time: Much more ads. It's come to a point wherr it's so annoying that standard doomscrolling has lost its appeal and I go do other things instead (like reading HN). Maybe others have a similar experience, which could explain things somewhat.
- K0nserv 1y ago
  I pay for premium so I don't know about the ads, but yeah the recommendations have taken a nose dive recently (not sure exactly when). EDIT: Since a lot of sibling comments are talking about the price of Youtube Premium. My $0.02, I was paying £16/month for Spotify Duo for me and my girlfriend. Dropped Spotify after 15 years of paying, for £18/month Youtube Premium family which includes Youtube Music in addition to ad free Youtube. Total win.
  - voxic11 1y ago
    Yeah same, when I realized you could migrate your playlists over to YouTube music that was the end of Spotify for me. The official migration tool was able to match all but two songs out of many thousands in my playlists.
- flax 1y ago
  I don't watch Youtube, but my young kid loves to watch screaming Minecraft morons pretend to scare themselves. I've been growing increasingly concerned by the ads he's incidentally seeing and was just yesterday looking at giving in and subscribing to a premium. There's a normal premium for $14 and a premium "lite" for $8. I'd have subscribed at $1/month, but those prices are absolutely insane. Instead, I installed revanced on his tablet. For free.
  - arcanemachiner 1y ago
    Google's finally cracking down on the adblocker scene, so enjoy Revanced while it lasts.
  - kelnos 1y ago
FateOfNations 1y ago
What counts as “a view” has pretty much never been particularly straight forward. The question is why YouTube can't just say, “Yes, in early August we made some changes to how views are counted.” All the available evidence seems to suggest that this is an accounting change, rather than a change in viewer behavior.
- jcranmer 1y ago
  I've seen a number of people complain about the change, and my first guess is that it is a change in methodology rather than an organic change. But if that's the case, why isn't YouTube coming out and saying it? Granted, it's not a great look to say "we've determined that our view counts are inflated because of $REASONS, so moving on from $DATE, we've applied a different methodology that will probably result in %xx loss in views." But the alternative of silence means that it's interpreted as "YouTube is screwing over the people they depend on for revenue because <fill in the blank>," which is at least as bad.
  - geerlingguy 1y ago
    Yeah... something definitely changed, it'd be nice if they at least mentioned it, so it isn't just a mystery that we have to debug with no look at the backend, just the effects.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Despite what the words from officials are saying, this isn't exactly a year of transparency. Though, Youtube has been like this well into the '10's, where some creators who had their entire channel shut down needed a twitter army just to provoke a response about what happened.
t-writescode 1y ago
This was also discussed on the most recent WAN show where they revealed a bunch of stats about views, likes, money earned per watch, and a whole bunch of other statistical analysis.
- pimlottc 1y ago
  This is mentioned and linked in the article.
jeffybefffy519 1y ago
More ads and a huge push towards shorts, which is really annoying
- epolanski 1y ago
  Also the suggestion algorithm is awful. I can't believe that with all the data they have on me, they struggle so much at recommending me video. It would literally ignore any of my subscriptions releasing a new video if I haven't watched the topic for few days.
  - feoren 1y ago
    They don't want you to watch a video you like. They want you to watch a video that makes them money. They want you to get angry, horny, and/or addicted. They have virtually no interest in showing you a video you'd actually enjoy.
- dr-detroit 1y ago
  [dead]
- busymom0 1y ago
  i only use YouTube and Google search from browser on both my Mac and iPhone. I have Userscript setup to hide various annoyances including shorts, community posts, AI Mode, trending searches, any YouTube video with less than 1000 views (AI slop typically), hiding the microphone button next to search field etc.
donatj 1y ago
Maybe it's just me, but my recommendations have been absolutely terrible lately. I'm not getting presented with the latest videos from people I follow / watch regularly and have actually had to remember to go looking for them. I am genuinely watching less YouTube because it's showing me less things I actually want to watch.
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  I find that shorts are constantly repeating the same ones I’ve already seen. The “subscription” tab is the best way though.
  - teaearlgraycold 1y ago
    If you disable watch history YouTube will disable shorts (the exploration feed, not shorts from your subs) and the algorithmic homepage. The setting will affect all of your YouTube clients. It's a great way to keep away from the general slop.
    - krs_ 1y ago
      You can only "pause" your watch history, as they call it, for some reason. And I keep having mine become unpaused constantly which I find interesting. I'm not sure if it's one of my clients doing it automatically or if Google just reenables the setting from time to time.
      - dinfinity 1y ago
        My watch history has been off for almost a decade now. They may weasel you into activating it via some other route that states in the fine print that they need to activate your watch history to provide [random almost unrelated feature].
        krs_ 1y ago
        Huh interesting. I'm guessing it might be one of my clients then because I haven't actively enabled it again myself, fine print or not.
themagician 1y ago
Monopoly in charge of the world's video content shows users what is most profitable instead of what they want to see. "Content creators" suffer as a result. Brain rot content is real, it's profitable, and it's only going to get "worse". Does anyone remember the internet before pop-up blockers? Like, right before. It felt like the same thing to me. The internet was infested with pop-ups and becoming borderline unusable, and then comes along the pop-up blocker (and other things, but I'm simplifying here) and there was a "golden age" which is now giving way to a new wave of advertising-based atrophy. Not sure what happens next.
- namuol 1y ago
  > Not sure what happens next. You said it: > it's only going to get "worse"
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  The analysis in this article shows that revenue and likes didn't actually go down, though. Just views. That's only bad for sponsors overall. I do wonder how this applies for smaller channels, though. Larger creators may get better revshare to make up for whatever the heck is happening. The little guy always gets screwed.
- bobsmooth 1y ago
  >and there was a "golden age" That golden age was short lived because all our favorite websites were unprofitable and shutdown.
  - themagician 1y ago
    > "That golden age was short lived because all our favorite websites were unprofitable and shutdown." Painfully true.
- hhhAndrew 1y ago
  One idea for what happens next, that rhymes with pop-up blocker revolution, is Gates' "disintermediation of everything" via AI, where agents on our behalf will be able to "find me a video I like and don't show me the ads", "renew my electricity contract and don't let them soft-scam me with their tricky pricing structure", "buy groceries online and don't get tricked into buying candy from a promo", etc. Agents make become like popup blockers in that way. Subsequent to that, I reckon we may see some sites adopting TOS forbidding people to have AI agents visit on their behalf.
roboror 1y ago
It's at least partially in YouTube's interest to lower view counts: • YT right now can't compete with direct creator sponsorships, which is a huge potential revenue source they want to tap. • This also makes YT Premium less appealing since there are still ads, though these are "skippable" in a sense.
- RandallBrown 1y ago
  YouTube Premium has recently added a skip button for sponsored segments. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but it works pretty well.
  - aucisson_masque 1y ago
    Would be pretty funny if it hooked back on SponsorBlock api.
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    They did? I saw they add a white dot on the timeline to help you skip it quickly. Thats been helpful.
    - RandallBrown 1y ago
      When a sponsored segment comes in there will be a "Skip Ahead" button that pops up. Sometimes it doesn't seem to pop up until I personally try and skip ahead by tapping the -> key on my keyboard.
pimlottc 1y ago
I had to look up what a "10/10" video means: > On the creator dashboard it ranks views on your latest video against your last 10 videos. So when someone complains their video is 10/10, it's means that it's their worst performing recent video. 1/10 is what you aim for.
- monkeywork 1y ago
  thanks for pointing that out - I didn't know that nor really catch it when he had that in the post I assumed the opposite.
- addandsubtract 1y ago
  How odd, a 10/10 is usually the best rating. 10/10 of Jeff not to include this clarification.
giveita 1y ago
The real dystopia is he would need a job just for the health insurance if YT revenue falls to zero even though he has other sources of income.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  Health insurance is still my biggest monthly expense (for a pretty terrible plan, all things considered, with no dental or vision) :(
- platevoltage 1y ago
  Yeah, the entire reason we have kept such an archaic health insurance system is to keep people working for someone else. Saved enough money to finally quit the job you hate? Think again.
imagetic 1y ago
YouTube feels more like the Home Shopping Network these days.
justinator 1y ago
One problem is that Restricted Mode has been turned on for some users, some videos are not shown to viewers when it's turned on, and videos that are labeled as restricted are done so automatically by a faulty AI system. You can see if restricted mode is turned on for you. Once on youtube.com, click your profile photo, and in the menu the pops down, look and see if "Restricted Mode:" is set to "On" or, "Off". Some people have found that by default it's been put to "On", even though they have not set it. If you're not logged in, Restricted Mode is calculated by a bizarre set of rules like your not-logged-in watching history that Google totally doesn't keep track off (ie: you watch a lot of Blues Clues, you're probably a child).
stronglikedan 1y ago
Maybe because people got tired of their subscription list being randomly ordered instead of alphabetical (which has been a bug for a ridiculously long time), and have started looking elsewhere for content.
- bmn__ 1y ago
  It's sorted by recency.
thornjm 1y ago
The pattern of: - Some channels being affected more than others - Likes remaining stable - Revenue remaining stable Could be explained by Youtube only counting non-adblocked views. Perhaps an attempt to align Youtube's goals with creators' goals. If we don't get revenue then you don't either.
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
I have noticed two changes this month: A lot more recommendations for videos with <100 views One long (>20s) unskippable ad followed by another with skip button but fewer intermittent videos throughout the rest of the video For long videos they will now roll an ad if you skip forward significantly So they are clearly doing two things: Pumping ads up for popular videos Randomly sampling new videos to put in the feed It’s an interesting exploit + explore strategy and it seems like everyone hates it
reassess_blind 1y ago
They don’t show any suggested videos on the logged out homepage anymore. Just a prompt to search. Anyone know why?
ojosilva 1y ago
No idea here, but since we are speculating, couldn't AI search results be behind this too? I mean, I haven't been clicking as much on video on search result pages because now they are either buried after AI summaries, or my search workflow starts off in a chat prompt somewhere where YT results are not even a thing most of the time.
- maltelandwehr 1y ago
  Youtube is a top 3 cited domain for many LLMs-based search and answer engines. So it should we one of the few domains that actually get significant clicks from ChatGPT, Perplexity & Co. Looking at my own behavior, I have to agree though. For stuff for which I used to look for a video tutorial, I now ask ChatGPT.
kelsey98765431 1y ago
This is oddly enough around the time I canceled my 10+ year premium subscription and moved to freetube. I cannot support the anti privacy crusade of asking for users government identification and i spoke with my wallet. What are the chances that enough people cancelled premium that it caused youtube to increase the amount of advertisements served? What are the odds that just drove away a bunch more people?
lisbbb 1y ago
Can OnlyFans be far behind?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
etempleton 1y ago
I have noticed a lot of channels I subscribe to don’t post nearly as often as they once had and I am not sure why. Some of them have quite a lot of subscribers and must do incredibly well, but they seem to have drifted away from regularly posting.
- lobsterthief 1y ago
  I had a channel (hit ~40k subs from ~15 videos), largely centered around hobby electronics, 3D printing, Raspberry Pi, etc. I stopped publishing videos around 2020 because the economics just didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to release subpar videos and was always challenging myself to improve production quality. It was fun, until it wasn’t. It took several days to shoot and edit a video. I’d publish it, it would do well, but YouTube paid such paltry revenue. I didn’t want to chase sponsorships because those don’t pay much either. I decided to focus my creative efforts elsewhere. I know things are even worse for YouTube creators now, given the ad market collapse and higher competition in the attention economy. I firmly believe that Google could reverse the trend if they spun up some pilot programs around assisting creators that match a certain algorithm to produce and scale video content—and pay them more so they can afford to take the time. Tl;dr; money and competition. But mostly money.
  - etempleton 1y ago
    Really sad to hear that the economics are so bad. I knew that they weren't great, but significantly worse than I imagined.
anghunk 1y ago
YouTube's recommendation algorithm has always been terrible; I only watch the channels I have subscribed to.
arandomsapien 1y ago
Linus tech tips mentioned the same thing is happening to his channel on a recent podcast. Maybe related, given they're both on the more technical side of the tech niche.
Ekaros 1y ago
Someone else is probably getting them. Maybe newer smaller channels. I think that is great. Even if it does hit some larger channels.

123 points by nfriedly 1y ago

I see a similar thing happen with npm stats occasionally, where the downloads count for popular packages will cut in half. Although I think it's just unreliable infrastructure there - it's usually back to the expected level a day or two later.

procaryote 1y ago

Isn't this just youtube cracking down on adblock? They have a plethora of ways to make the app and website suck for non-paying users now, including and not limited to: * faking an interruption when starting to play * random errors mid-play * no longer playing on hover on-web or in-app I've just taken that as a good signal I should read more books instead, but I imagine it kills view-counts

kamikazeturtles 1y ago
Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there. I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. I doubt their crackdown on adblock users would affect view counts that much, but I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence and a few Google searches
- RajT88 1y ago
  I mostly watch on desktop. Their current anti-adblock strategy does get past what I am using - but I have a different clever workaround. When the ad starts, just refresh the page. It will act as though it's already played the ads, even if it is an unskippable ad.
  - monknomo 1y ago
    This reminds of something that has been bugging me on mobile. I click a video by accident. It begins to play the ad before the video. I have to watch the add before I can go back to looking for what I wanted to watch. eugh
- ajross 1y ago
  > Most Youtube viewers watch on mobile or smart TVs, so adblockers aren't an issue there. I continue to find it amazing just How Big the impact of "advertising" is in the brain of a median HN commenter vs. the attention paid (almost none) to it by citizens at large. Like, that Liberty Mutual Duck is just weird to most folks, but to us it's somehow the greatest assault on our freedom imaginable?
  - djmips 1y ago
    duck?
    - ajross 1y ago
      It was a riff on the AFLAC duck from a few decades back, a similarly hated campaign that played everywhere and that we all survived just fine. Maybe the humor was bad. But the point stands: advertising has been with us since the dawn of "media" and no one cares outside our oddball bubble. People sat through ads on their sitcoms in the 70's and they sit through the annoying insurance birds, and... who cares? It's only here that people somehow believe that contra all evidence, somehow advertising on the internet is a unique affront to all that is holy. When... it's just ads!
      - discostrings 1y ago
        In the 70s the ads were a one-way broadcast. Now the ads watch you back. Far beyond the time wasted, they're an invasion of privacy.
  - Our_Benefactors 1y ago
    It’s because making the choice of not being served ads is increasingly a technical challenge/hobby undertaking. Nerds like challenges. Other people are unaware it’s even a choice they have.
    - tavavex 1y ago
      You're right, but it's not because it's a challenge that we like, it's not like this is something enjoyable. Nerds do it through gritted teeth, it's annoying to bypass all of that. They just know it's a possibility and care about it enough to pursue it. Most people don't know and don't care.
- Figs 1y ago
  > I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. This is not a safe assumption. Personally, I've stopped using YouTube entirely for entertainment; the level of annoyance dealing with it vs the value I get out of it is just not worth it any more. I'm doing other things with my time now instead of watching YouTube. Some of that is watching video on other platforms, and some of that is spending time on other hobbies instead.
  - gibspaulding 1y ago
    Yeah, UBO and Sponsor Block are still working for me but if they stop I’ll be gone. I haven’t browsed Reddit since I switched to iOS and lost access to RedReader.
- kelnos 1y ago
  > I'd assume most adblock users on web would disable it to continue watching. Not sure if I'm typical (probably not!) but I never disable the ad blocker; if a video or site doesn't work with an ad blocker, I just move on.
b112 1y ago
Any time I have any of those issues, I entirely attribute to the website. I can't imagine the average user thinking otherwise. If youtube is doing any of those things, instead of just saying "pay", they're dumb as dirt. Why would I want to pay for what is perceived as a junky, buggy site?
- nmeofthestate 1y ago
  Maybe YouTube consider it unlikely for an adblock user to ever buy premium, so they just try to drive such viewers away instead.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    I'm an adblock user and I do pay for Premium, so there's at least one of us. I do genuinely want to watch YouTube videos, but I don't want to have to deal with anti-adblock measures ruining the experience. So I pay. Which is reasonable, no? Either I pay with cash or by allowing myself to be manipulated into buying things I don't want or need. If those are the choices, I choose not to pay with my attention.
  - b112 1y ago
    Yes, but that's the "dumb as dirt" part. You never, ever "drive users away". Ever. A person with no money now (a college student on a tight budget?) may in a few years have a healthy income. A single person may be struggling, then find a partner and collectively they have more income. People's income levels change. Training them that your product is utter and complete garbage, means those people won't ever become customers. Ever. The truth of the matter is, that just like their search, every other aspect of Google's infra is in a state of decay. Youtube is slow and takes forever to start now. Google search is pathetic, takes forever to give results in some circumstances, and randomly locks people out with captchas. The Google of today must be complete chaos internally, it's the only explanation I can see. If the problem is AI, you never give up a cash cow whilst you pivot. You don't let what you have fall to tatters, whilst you pursue some other goal. Especially when Google has the scope and capability to maintain and yet also pursue other avenues. I suspect, but could be entirely wrong here, that Google has pulled key people, drivers, movers, which are a rare breed -- out of key positions in all of their structure and focused them on something else. But anyhow.
port11 1y ago
That seems to be about it. Our Tizen TV doesn't block the ads and we don't get any issues with playback. As soon as I'm on Safari or Brave with an adblocker, YouTube is teeth-grinding irritating. I checked my screen time and I'm down to about 15 minutes per week, whereas before I'd watch my subscriptions for about 2h per week. Can't say I miss it.

gwbas1c 1y ago

I wonder if some of Youtube's behavior was responsible for inflating the number of views. For example, after searching on my phone, some of the videos in the search results would play silently without me selecting the video. Then, the video would show up in my history. I also wonder if they aren't counting short (under 10 seconds) views of longer videos?

nkrisc 1y ago
This happened all the time. Scrolling through videos would cause them to start playing inline in the feed view if your finger lingered a millisecond too long. So I have all these videos I’ve accidentally “watched” while trying to scroll past them.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
techjamie 1y ago
This can be disabled. Go to your profile in the app, then to settings in the upper right. Under General there's a setting called Playback in Feeds.
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  Yes, I turned that off immediately.

usefulcat 1y ago

I used to watch YT pretty frequently, though I've never bothered to sign in. This is via the Roku app, as opposed to via a browser. Starting sometime within the past month or so, they changed the interface so that instead of having many rows of suggestions, now it only has a single row, making it more work for me to find something I want to watch. As a result I watch it much less now. Prior to this change, I was considering paying for it to skip the ads. You could argue that since I've already given them lots of info about myself (I'm watching it over GFiber after all) I may as well just sign in, but this level of intentional enshittification really rubs me the wrong way.

nntwozz 1y ago

RedLetterMedia dropped a video about this: Obligatory "YouTube is Broken" Video https://youtu.be/q5-b7v6EIzc https://youtu.be/q5-b7v6EIzc

teiferer 1y ago

As a user, I noticed a drastic change around that time: Much more ads. It's come to a point wherr it's so annoying that standard doomscrolling has lost its appeal and I go do other things instead (like reading HN). Maybe others have a similar experience, which could explain things somewhat.

K0nserv 1y ago
I pay for premium so I don't know about the ads, but yeah the recommendations have taken a nose dive recently (not sure exactly when). EDIT: Since a lot of sibling comments are talking about the price of Youtube Premium. My $0.02, I was paying £16/month for Spotify Duo for me and my girlfriend. Dropped Spotify after 15 years of paying, for £18/month Youtube Premium family which includes Youtube Music in addition to ad free Youtube. Total win.
- voxic11 1y ago
  Yeah same, when I realized you could migrate your playlists over to YouTube music that was the end of Spotify for me. The official migration tool was able to match all but two songs out of many thousands in my playlists.
flax 1y ago
I don't watch Youtube, but my young kid loves to watch screaming Minecraft morons pretend to scare themselves. I've been growing increasingly concerned by the ads he's incidentally seeing and was just yesterday looking at giving in and subscribing to a premium. There's a normal premium for $14 and a premium "lite" for $8. I'd have subscribed at $1/month, but those prices are absolutely insane. Instead, I installed revanced on his tablet. For free.
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  Google's finally cracking down on the adblocker scene, so enjoy Revanced while it lasts.
- kelnos 1y ago

FateOfNations 1y ago

What counts as “a view” has pretty much never been particularly straight forward. The question is why YouTube can't just say, “Yes, in early August we made some changes to how views are counted.” All the available evidence seems to suggest that this is an accounting change, rather than a change in viewer behavior.

jcranmer 1y ago
I've seen a number of people complain about the change, and my first guess is that it is a change in methodology rather than an organic change. But if that's the case, why isn't YouTube coming out and saying it? Granted, it's not a great look to say "we've determined that our view counts are inflated because of $REASONS, so moving on from $DATE, we've applied a different methodology that will probably result in %xx loss in views." But the alternative of silence means that it's interpreted as "YouTube is screwing over the people they depend on for revenue because <fill in the blank>," which is at least as bad.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  Yeah... something definitely changed, it'd be nice if they at least mentioned it, so it isn't just a mystery that we have to debug with no look at the backend, just the effects.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
Despite what the words from officials are saying, this isn't exactly a year of transparency. Though, Youtube has been like this well into the '10's, where some creators who had their entire channel shut down needed a twitter army just to provoke a response about what happened.

t-writescode 1y ago

This was also discussed on the most recent WAN show where they revealed a bunch of stats about views, likes, money earned per watch, and a whole bunch of other statistical analysis.

pimlottc 1y ago
This is mentioned and linked in the article.

jeffybefffy519 1y ago

More ads and a huge push towards shorts, which is really annoying

epolanski 1y ago
Also the suggestion algorithm is awful. I can't believe that with all the data they have on me, they struggle so much at recommending me video. It would literally ignore any of my subscriptions releasing a new video if I haven't watched the topic for few days.
- feoren 1y ago
  They don't want you to watch a video you like. They want you to watch a video that makes them money. They want you to get angry, horny, and/or addicted. They have virtually no interest in showing you a video you'd actually enjoy.
dr-detroit 1y ago
[dead]
busymom0 1y ago
i only use YouTube and Google search from browser on both my Mac and iPhone. I have Userscript setup to hide various annoyances including shorts, community posts, AI Mode, trending searches, any YouTube video with less than 1000 views (AI slop typically), hiding the microphone button next to search field etc.

donatj 1y ago

Maybe it's just me, but my recommendations have been absolutely terrible lately. I'm not getting presented with the latest videos from people I follow / watch regularly and have actually had to remember to go looking for them. I am genuinely watching less YouTube because it's showing me less things I actually want to watch.

hdgvhicv 1y ago
I find that shorts are constantly repeating the same ones I’ve already seen. The “subscription” tab is the best way though.
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago
  If you disable watch history YouTube will disable shorts (the exploration feed, not shorts from your subs) and the algorithmic homepage. The setting will affect all of your YouTube clients. It's a great way to keep away from the general slop.
  - krs_ 1y ago
    You can only "pause" your watch history, as they call it, for some reason. And I keep having mine become unpaused constantly which I find interesting. I'm not sure if it's one of my clients doing it automatically or if Google just reenables the setting from time to time.
    - dinfinity 1y ago
      My watch history has been off for almost a decade now. They may weasel you into activating it via some other route that states in the fine print that they need to activate your watch history to provide [random almost unrelated feature].
      - krs_ 1y ago
        Huh interesting. I'm guessing it might be one of my clients then because I haven't actively enabled it again myself, fine print or not.

themagician 1y ago

Monopoly in charge of the world's video content shows users what is most profitable instead of what they want to see. "Content creators" suffer as a result. Brain rot content is real, it's profitable, and it's only going to get "worse". Does anyone remember the internet before pop-up blockers? Like, right before. It felt like the same thing to me. The internet was infested with pop-ups and becoming borderline unusable, and then comes along the pop-up blocker (and other things, but I'm simplifying here) and there was a "golden age" which is now giving way to a new wave of advertising-based atrophy. Not sure what happens next.

namuol 1y ago
> Not sure what happens next. You said it: > it's only going to get "worse"
johnnyanmac 1y ago
The analysis in this article shows that revenue and likes didn't actually go down, though. Just views. That's only bad for sponsors overall. I do wonder how this applies for smaller channels, though. Larger creators may get better revshare to make up for whatever the heck is happening. The little guy always gets screwed.
bobsmooth 1y ago
>and there was a "golden age" That golden age was short lived because all our favorite websites were unprofitable and shutdown.
- themagician 1y ago
  > "That golden age was short lived because all our favorite websites were unprofitable and shutdown." Painfully true.
hhhAndrew 1y ago
One idea for what happens next, that rhymes with pop-up blocker revolution, is Gates' "disintermediation of everything" via AI, where agents on our behalf will be able to "find me a video I like and don't show me the ads", "renew my electricity contract and don't let them soft-scam me with their tricky pricing structure", "buy groceries online and don't get tricked into buying candy from a promo", etc. Agents make become like popup blockers in that way. Subsequent to that, I reckon we may see some sites adopting TOS forbidding people to have AI agents visit on their behalf.

roboror 1y ago

It's at least partially in YouTube's interest to lower view counts: • YT right now can't compete with direct creator sponsorships, which is a huge potential revenue source they want to tap. • This also makes YT Premium less appealing since there are still ads, though these are "skippable" in a sense.

RandallBrown 1y ago
YouTube Premium has recently added a skip button for sponsored segments. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but it works pretty well.
- aucisson_masque 1y ago
  Would be pretty funny if it hooked back on SponsorBlock api.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  They did? I saw they add a white dot on the timeline to help you skip it quickly. Thats been helpful.
  - RandallBrown 1y ago
    When a sponsored segment comes in there will be a "Skip Ahead" button that pops up. Sometimes it doesn't seem to pop up until I personally try and skip ahead by tapping the -> key on my keyboard.

pimlottc 1y ago

I had to look up what a "10/10" video means: > On the creator dashboard it ranks views on your latest video against your last 10 videos. So when someone complains their video is 10/10, it's means that it's their worst performing recent video. 1/10 is what you aim for.

monkeywork 1y ago
thanks for pointing that out - I didn't know that nor really catch it when he had that in the post I assumed the opposite.
addandsubtract 1y ago
How odd, a 10/10 is usually the best rating. 10/10 of Jeff not to include this clarification.

giveita 1y ago

The real dystopia is he would need a job just for the health insurance if YT revenue falls to zero even though he has other sources of income.

geerlingguy 1y ago
Health insurance is still my biggest monthly expense (for a pretty terrible plan, all things considered, with no dental or vision) :(
platevoltage 1y ago
Yeah, the entire reason we have kept such an archaic health insurance system is to keep people working for someone else. Saved enough money to finally quit the job you hate? Think again.

imagetic 1y ago

YouTube feels more like the Home Shopping Network these days.

justinator 1y ago

One problem is that Restricted Mode has been turned on for some users, some videos are not shown to viewers when it's turned on, and videos that are labeled as restricted are done so automatically by a faulty AI system. You can see if restricted mode is turned on for you. Once on youtube.com, click your profile photo, and in the menu the pops down, look and see if "Restricted Mode:" is set to "On" or, "Off". Some people have found that by default it's been put to "On", even though they have not set it. If you're not logged in, Restricted Mode is calculated by a bizarre set of rules like your not-logged-in watching history that Google totally doesn't keep track off (ie: you watch a lot of Blues Clues, you're probably a child).

stronglikedan 1y ago

Maybe because people got tired of their subscription list being randomly ordered instead of alphabetical (which has been a bug for a ridiculously long time), and have started looking elsewhere for content.

bmn__ 1y ago
It's sorted by recency.

thornjm 1y ago

The pattern of: - Some channels being affected more than others - Likes remaining stable - Revenue remaining stable Could be explained by Youtube only counting non-adblocked views. Perhaps an attempt to align Youtube's goals with creators' goals. If we don't get revenue then you don't either.

AndrewKemendo 1y ago

I have noticed two changes this month: A lot more recommendations for videos with <100 views One long (>20s) unskippable ad followed by another with skip button but fewer intermittent videos throughout the rest of the video For long videos they will now roll an ad if you skip forward significantly So they are clearly doing two things: Pumping ads up for popular videos Randomly sampling new videos to put in the feed It’s an interesting exploit + explore strategy and it seems like everyone hates it

reassess_blind 1y ago

They don’t show any suggested videos on the logged out homepage anymore. Just a prompt to search. Anyone know why?

ojosilva 1y ago

No idea here, but since we are speculating, couldn't AI search results be behind this too? I mean, I haven't been clicking as much on video on search result pages because now they are either buried after AI summaries, or my search workflow starts off in a chat prompt somewhere where YT results are not even a thing most of the time.

maltelandwehr 1y ago
Youtube is a top 3 cited domain for many LLMs-based search and answer engines. So it should we one of the few domains that actually get significant clicks from ChatGPT, Perplexity & Co. Looking at my own behavior, I have to agree though. For stuff for which I used to look for a video tutorial, I now ask ChatGPT.

kelsey98765431 1y ago

This is oddly enough around the time I canceled my 10+ year premium subscription and moved to freetube. I cannot support the anti privacy crusade of asking for users government identification and i spoke with my wallet. What are the chances that enough people cancelled premium that it caused youtube to increase the amount of advertisements served? What are the odds that just drove away a bunch more people?

lisbbb 1y ago

Can OnlyFans be far behind?

deleted 1y ago

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etempleton 1y ago

I have noticed a lot of channels I subscribe to don’t post nearly as often as they once had and I am not sure why. Some of them have quite a lot of subscribers and must do incredibly well, but they seem to have drifted away from regularly posting.

lobsterthief 1y ago
I had a channel (hit ~40k subs from ~15 videos), largely centered around hobby electronics, 3D printing, Raspberry Pi, etc. I stopped publishing videos around 2020 because the economics just didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to release subpar videos and was always challenging myself to improve production quality. It was fun, until it wasn’t. It took several days to shoot and edit a video. I’d publish it, it would do well, but YouTube paid such paltry revenue. I didn’t want to chase sponsorships because those don’t pay much either. I decided to focus my creative efforts elsewhere. I know things are even worse for YouTube creators now, given the ad market collapse and higher competition in the attention economy. I firmly believe that Google could reverse the trend if they spun up some pilot programs around assisting creators that match a certain algorithm to produce and scale video content—and pay them more so they can afford to take the time. Tl;dr; money and competition. But mostly money.
- etempleton 1y ago
  Really sad to hear that the economics are so bad. I knew that they weren't great, but significantly worse than I imagined.

anghunk 1y ago

YouTube's recommendation algorithm has always been terrible; I only watch the channels I have subscribed to.

arandomsapien 1y ago

Linus tech tips mentioned the same thing is happening to his channel on a recent podcast. Maybe related, given they're both on the more technical side of the tech niche.

Ekaros 1y ago

Someone else is probably getting them. Maybe newer smaller channels. I think that is great. Even if it does hit some larger channels.