7 ms·

Makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. They’re pretending peopl

Makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. They’re pretending people care about their internal metrics, when people really do not. Maybe the creator, but again, they’re probably also just interested in eyeball counts. It’s dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if you’re simply at war with adblockers and you’re trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them.

tracker1 1y ago
Especially in terms of baked in ads from the creator, whose terms are based on views, separate from YouTube revenue.
estimator7292 1y ago
The view counter isn't for you. It's merely a convenience that you're showed it at all. View counts are for monetization. If a view isn't monetized, why count it? Purely foe vanity? You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source and no other reason. View metrics and monetization are what count, not your subjective experience. YouTube does not care one tiny bit about how much you like the site or interface or what you think of the view counter.
- ianbutler 1y ago
  It's for sponsors too so yes a total view count is important since creators use views to negotiate deals. I have adblock[0], but I still watch sponsor spots. 0: I just side step this entirely these days by paying for premium.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - nandomrumber 1y ago
    Why should sponsor care sent viewers who block their advertising? I’ve been a premium member for about 15 years.
    - stetrain 1y ago
      Ad blockers and Premium don’t block embedded sponsorships in the videos themselves, which are a common way for creators to monetize their videos.
      - hirako2000 1y ago
        Some do. With crowd funded submissions on where the placement starts and ends.
      - girvo 1y ago
        Premium absolutely does, via YouTube's new "Jump Forward" feature.
      - tcfhgj 1y ago
        sponsorblock does
      - Braxton1980 1y ago
        There's a new skip method for premium members (which I have) where you can skip commonly skipped sections as recorded by other users. For example- if a video has a section about their sponsor from 3:30 to 4:10 and I press the right seek button twice around 3:30 the jump will be to 4:10. It also displays an alert that it's using the feature.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- easygenes 1y ago
  This is a bit too blunt a look at it. YouTube exists as an ecosystem with increasing competition. View and subscriber counts are their core incentive and feedback systems they have with the actual producers that make their whole ecosystem work. Without those there's no real reason for people to put videos there. This as an open and celebrated system drives producers to advertise for YouTube via the almost-compulsory every-video mention of liking and subscribing and forwarding videos to friends. Youtube is well aware of this, hence things like the iconic long running physical play button trophy delivery system. I'd also say more broadly that making such sweeping claims for YouTube as a collective entity not caring at all about viewers is too reductive. It's more defensible and relatable to claim that, though there may be many people working for YouTube because they deeply care about a mission of democratizing multimedia publishing, the incentives and structures around it being a PBC often lead to decisions which drown out that care from corporate heads who are more profit than mission driven.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- stetrain 1y ago
  Videos are often monetized via sponsor placements in the videos themselves. The creator of the video would like an accurate view count to report to their sponsors. This is completely separate from the YouTube platform ads and monetization which is what the ad blockers are blocking.
  - xeromal 1y ago
    I can't reply to your deeper comment but there is a youtube specific extension that blocks ads to sponsor placements by skipping them. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo... Has 2 million users which isn't a ton but just mentioning that it is used and it works well.
    - hirako2000 1y ago
      And this ships as a plugin to some unofficial YouTube player. The actual number is far higher.
    - slaymaker1907 1y ago
      There is also kind of a built in sponsorblock for YouTube on mobile. If you double tap to skip 5s repeatedly, a button quickly pops up to skip ahead (not explicitly about sponsor segments, but I'm sure this is what it is used for 99% of the time).
      - mvdtnz 1y ago
        FYI this is a premium-only feature. It's one that I am very thankful for. I pay a pretty penny for youtube and I don't appreciate "creators" end-running around that to peddle their shitty AG1 supplements or woodworking tools I can't buy in my country.
  - xp84 1y ago
    This is the best counterargument I've seen for why YouTubers might be vexed by this, however I've felt it was pretty fair to expect that adblocked views don't really "count" in the "game" that you can argue YouTube is operating with the "View Count" metric and therefore I don't see much room for anyone to feel indignant or wronged. Imagine a creator whose viewers all watched with ads blocked (and without YT Premium either). That creator is, objectively speaking not partnering with Google in any way, they're just using the platform as a free CDN. So the failure of Google to provide that person with accurate metrics for him to operate his business (that Google isn't a part of) isn't all that offensive. So someone losing visibility to their "views" if it's because of non-monetized views (adblocked ones) seems proportionally fair. There's always self-hosting your videos, but yes, that's expensive. It's a tradeoff the content creator has to make: A cut of your revenue + a ton of content restrictions, in exchange for discoverability + free CDN.
- manquer 1y ago
  > View counts are for monetization Agree, however view counts, i.e. metrics tracked by YT, or by sponsors,creators in fancy dashboards isn't the view counter we are shown and nobody is questioning how those are implemented. The View Counter means very specific UI component in YT interface shown to regular users. > view counter isn't for you Disagree, View counter is a important decision making input along with the thumbnail, title and duration of the video on if a user will click on the video to watch them. It is in effect an advertisement for the video. If that wasn't the case, then YouTube wouldn't be showing them in every list view and next to every thumbnail. When the numbers no longer represent what the users think they represent I would say it is not far from false advertising. A fair amount of people on here and I have both YT Premium and also use some adblocker, should our views be counted or not according to this point of view? .
  - Braxton1980 1y ago
    I'm so glad other people here pay for premium because on Tiktok and Reddit a common joke is how few people pay for YT. My Verizon cell phone plan offers it at a slightly discounted $10 a month. For a completely ad free (ads from Youtube) experience it's well worth it considering how many car and tech videos I watch. It also offers a higher bitrate 1080p option on some videos which is a cherry on top.
    - xp84 1y ago
      Yeah it's absurd to me how much people bitch about YouTube advertising and don't pay. To me, either you don't watch enough YouTube for the complaints to be warranted, or you do watch a lot, and you're just torturing yourself to save $15 and blaming YouTube for your choice. It's like complaining about a Quarter Pounder "not coming with cheese" and constantly trying to steal cheese, when you could just pay the dollar and get cheese every time.
      - smnthermes 1y ago
        Or they just don't want to support a dodgy advertising company.
- Braxton1980 1y ago
  >You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source How are these two statements not contradictions?
  - rmunn 1y ago
    Rephrase it as "Youtube doesn't care about you, just about putting ads in front of your face" and it's not a contradiction. As long as you don't get irritated enough to go away and stop using Youtube entirely, they don't care about improving your viewing experience. Another way to phrase it is the classic line "If you're not paying for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product."
- ruszki 1y ago
  If I understand well, my view is not counted as a YouTube Premium subscriber. I’m not sure that anybody is happy with that. Also there is zero good reason to have a separate API for this. Even Google knows this, because Google Analytics has an adblocker proof solution for at least a decade.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    It's counted as a view, and beyond that, in general the content creator gets a higher payout from Premium viewers than from ad viewing users.
    - xp84 1y ago
      I'd worry that if this is really caused by an adblocker, it's possible YT uses these same view counting mechanism that's being blocked to increment their Premium views, meaning Premium subscribers who don't explicitly turn their blocker off on YouTube could be being undercounted. If so that should be fixed, for Premium viewership, as that's not really fair to anyone.
      - tracker1 1y ago
        That is hard for me to even say... 95% of my viewing is via my NVidia Shield TV box attached to my TV. I only occasionally will view a tutorial or hit YouTube Music from my computer or phone.
- jowea 1y ago
  Why are view counts displayed prominently in the UI then? Every suggested video shows it's view count as a sort of social proof.
monkeywork 1y ago
Why does anyone not financially motivated care about how many views a video gets? Use the like function if you want I guess . It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5
- NonHyloMorph 1y ago
  If you claim your counting views while simultaneoudly andvwithout disclosure don't count views of people using an adbkocker even so you could then thagvis deceiving. If it was the case I second waht the above poster hinted at: seems like a strategy to manipulate public discourse by using influencers frustration over where it hurts them (their purse) enhanced by the haunting sensation of loosing control (since they cannot know how and if they are negatively impacted by what - which makes the desire to find the cause of effect/guilty oarty/or a scapegoat) in order to disincentivice adblockers. If the articles assumptions are correct, and it is beyond googles engineering teams to fix that issue (which seems unreasonabke to assume) theb that would be a pretty (and petty) malign and antisocial policy to pursue. (Don't be evil once was a thing for good reason)
  - jsnell 1y ago
    What you're ignoring is that this was a change to an ad blocker[0], not a change to the site. Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site? [0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers. [1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional.
    - chris_wot 1y ago
      Google could improve the way they serve ads. Like, one ad per “ad session”, no 5 minute ads that are longer than the video you are trying to watch, etc. They are trying to increase ad revenue, but by increased Nguyen ads and making it harder to skip them it ironically is causing much worse practices such as ad blocking.
nkrisc 1y ago
Why would anyone just watching videos on YouTube care how many people have seen the video? You enjoy it or you don’t, how many other people have seen it doesn’t change the viewing experience at all. The only people who would care are YT themselves, the creator, other creators, and advertisers. I don’t know why they even publicly display the view count.
- tempestn 1y ago
  Number of views and views to likes ratio are both signals of value.
  - mcmoor 1y ago
    Likes to dislikes is an even better signal. Shame on YouTube for removing that.
    - tempestn 1y ago
      You can actually use a browser extension to show it still. The dislike count is still available, just not shown.
      - mcmoor 1y ago
        I've heard that it's not actual dislike count, but extrapolated data contributed from people who installed the extensions. But I've also heard that some channels have compared it to their actual dislike count and it only differs little.
  - nkrisc 1y ago
    To whom? To advertisers, and the creators, of course. To viewers? How does that help inform me if I'll like it?
    - gkbrk 1y ago
      If you're looking for a tutorial, and one video has 5000 views and 4000 likes, the other has 5000 views and 2 likes, that really doesn't help inform you about which video might solve your problem better?
jefftk 1y ago
Perhaps then you should try to convince EasyList to remove the view counter from their block list? This wasn't a change YouTube made, this was adblockers choosing not to let YouTube track views for privacy purposes.
- echoangle 1y ago
  Well it’s not like youtube couldn’t technically track the views even with adblockers if they wanted. The video is still being streamed after all, you don’t need the client to call another endpoint to know whether it’s streaming the video.
  - jefftk 1y ago
    Google built a system that tracked video views. Users installed a browser extension that intentionally breaks this tracking for privacy reasons. Why should Google do anything? They're not the one that broke it, and these users don't want to be tracked!
    - echoangle 1y ago
      Because it’s hurting creators, not viewers?
      - jefftk 1y ago
        I don't know, it's not obvious to me that YouTube should prioritize the creator's desire to track users over the user's desire not to be tracked.
      - SchemaLoad 1y ago
        Google already doesn't pay out creators for views with blocked ads, no advertiser is going to pay for ads that were never shown. The view counter doesn't matter to that. Perhaps Youtube could enforce tougher blocking of ad blockers to support creators better.
        1y ago
ajross 1y ago
> It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views. So... per the upthread point, paying people based on views that actually generate revenue seems fairer and more optimal, no? If YouTube can't make money from your content, why do you expect them to pay you for it?
- Mond_ 1y ago
  > That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views. That's nonsense, as a viewer of YouTube videos I do not expect to her paid for this. I guess it'd be nice if I were paid for watching YouTube, so maybe you have a point after all! :-)
  - ajross 1y ago
    That's deliberately misinterpreting. The overwhelming criticism of this view count regression kerfuffle was centered around creators and the lost revenue: YouTube was pervasively accused of cooking numbers to stiff their creators. No one anywhere was arguing from the perspective of a viewer. Until it turned out that the regression was due to an adblocker change. Now suddenly creators don't matter and it's really the viewer's visibility into view counts that is the important element. And that seems... insincere.

tracker1 1y ago

Especially in terms of baked in ads from the creator, whose terms are based on views, separate from YouTube revenue.

estimator7292 1y ago

The view counter isn't for you. It's merely a convenience that you're showed it at all. View counts are for monetization. If a view isn't monetized, why count it? Purely foe vanity? You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source and no other reason. View metrics and monetization are what count, not your subjective experience. YouTube does not care one tiny bit about how much you like the site or interface or what you think of the view counter.

ianbutler 1y ago
It's for sponsors too so yes a total view count is important since creators use views to negotiate deals. I have adblock[0], but I still watch sponsor spots. 0: I just side step this entirely these days by paying for premium.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nandomrumber 1y ago
  Why should sponsor care sent viewers who block their advertising? I’ve been a premium member for about 15 years.
  - stetrain 1y ago
    Ad blockers and Premium don’t block embedded sponsorships in the videos themselves, which are a common way for creators to monetize their videos.
    - hirako2000 1y ago
      Some do. With crowd funded submissions on where the placement starts and ends.
    - girvo 1y ago
      Premium absolutely does, via YouTube's new "Jump Forward" feature.
    - tcfhgj 1y ago
      sponsorblock does
    - Braxton1980 1y ago
      There's a new skip method for premium members (which I have) where you can skip commonly skipped sections as recorded by other users. For example- if a video has a section about their sponsor from 3:30 to 4:10 and I press the right seek button twice around 3:30 the jump will be to 4:10. It also displays an alert that it's using the feature.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
easygenes 1y ago
This is a bit too blunt a look at it. YouTube exists as an ecosystem with increasing competition. View and subscriber counts are their core incentive and feedback systems they have with the actual producers that make their whole ecosystem work. Without those there's no real reason for people to put videos there. This as an open and celebrated system drives producers to advertise for YouTube via the almost-compulsory every-video mention of liking and subscribing and forwarding videos to friends. Youtube is well aware of this, hence things like the iconic long running physical play button trophy delivery system. I'd also say more broadly that making such sweeping claims for YouTube as a collective entity not caring at all about viewers is too reductive. It's more defensible and relatable to claim that, though there may be many people working for YouTube because they deeply care about a mission of democratizing multimedia publishing, the incentives and structures around it being a PBC often lead to decisions which drown out that care from corporate heads who are more profit than mission driven.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
stetrain 1y ago
Videos are often monetized via sponsor placements in the videos themselves. The creator of the video would like an accurate view count to report to their sponsors. This is completely separate from the YouTube platform ads and monetization which is what the ad blockers are blocking.
- xeromal 1y ago
  I can't reply to your deeper comment but there is a youtube specific extension that blocks ads to sponsor placements by skipping them. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sponsorblock-for-yo... Has 2 million users which isn't a ton but just mentioning that it is used and it works well.
  - hirako2000 1y ago
    And this ships as a plugin to some unofficial YouTube player. The actual number is far higher.
  - slaymaker1907 1y ago
    There is also kind of a built in sponsorblock for YouTube on mobile. If you double tap to skip 5s repeatedly, a button quickly pops up to skip ahead (not explicitly about sponsor segments, but I'm sure this is what it is used for 99% of the time).
    - mvdtnz 1y ago
      FYI this is a premium-only feature. It's one that I am very thankful for. I pay a pretty penny for youtube and I don't appreciate "creators" end-running around that to peddle their shitty AG1 supplements or woodworking tools I can't buy in my country.
- xp84 1y ago
  This is the best counterargument I've seen for why YouTubers might be vexed by this, however I've felt it was pretty fair to expect that adblocked views don't really "count" in the "game" that you can argue YouTube is operating with the "View Count" metric and therefore I don't see much room for anyone to feel indignant or wronged. Imagine a creator whose viewers all watched with ads blocked (and without YT Premium either). That creator is, objectively speaking not partnering with Google in any way, they're just using the platform as a free CDN. So the failure of Google to provide that person with accurate metrics for him to operate his business (that Google isn't a part of) isn't all that offensive. So someone losing visibility to their "views" if it's because of non-monetized views (adblocked ones) seems proportionally fair. There's always self-hosting your videos, but yes, that's expensive. It's a tradeoff the content creator has to make: A cut of your revenue + a ton of content restrictions, in exchange for discoverability + free CDN.
manquer 1y ago
> View counts are for monetization Agree, however view counts, i.e. metrics tracked by YT, or by sponsors,creators in fancy dashboards isn't the view counter we are shown and nobody is questioning how those are implemented. The View Counter means very specific UI component in YT interface shown to regular users. > view counter isn't for you Disagree, View counter is a important decision making input along with the thumbnail, title and duration of the video on if a user will click on the video to watch them. It is in effect an advertisement for the video. If that wasn't the case, then YouTube wouldn't be showing them in every list view and next to every thumbnail. When the numbers no longer represent what the users think they represent I would say it is not far from false advertising. A fair amount of people on here and I have both YT Premium and also use some adblocker, should our views be counted or not according to this point of view? .
- Braxton1980 1y ago
  I'm so glad other people here pay for premium because on Tiktok and Reddit a common joke is how few people pay for YT. My Verizon cell phone plan offers it at a slightly discounted $10 a month. For a completely ad free (ads from Youtube) experience it's well worth it considering how many car and tech videos I watch. It also offers a higher bitrate 1080p option on some videos which is a cherry on top.
  - xp84 1y ago
    Yeah it's absurd to me how much people bitch about YouTube advertising and don't pay. To me, either you don't watch enough YouTube for the complaints to be warranted, or you do watch a lot, and you're just torturing yourself to save $15 and blaming YouTube for your choice. It's like complaining about a Quarter Pounder "not coming with cheese" and constantly trying to steal cheese, when you could just pay the dollar and get cheese every time.
    - smnthermes 1y ago
      Or they just don't want to support a dodgy advertising company.
Braxton1980 1y ago
>You, a viewer, are nearly irrelevant to YouTube. You exist purely as a revenue source How are these two statements not contradictions?
- rmunn 1y ago
  Rephrase it as "Youtube doesn't care about you, just about putting ads in front of your face" and it's not a contradiction. As long as you don't get irritated enough to go away and stop using Youtube entirely, they don't care about improving your viewing experience. Another way to phrase it is the classic line "If you're not paying for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product."
ruszki 1y ago
If I understand well, my view is not counted as a YouTube Premium subscriber. I’m not sure that anybody is happy with that. Also there is zero good reason to have a separate API for this. Even Google knows this, because Google Analytics has an adblocker proof solution for at least a decade.
- tracker1 1y ago
  It's counted as a view, and beyond that, in general the content creator gets a higher payout from Premium viewers than from ad viewing users.
  - xp84 1y ago
    I'd worry that if this is really caused by an adblocker, it's possible YT uses these same view counting mechanism that's being blocked to increment their Premium views, meaning Premium subscribers who don't explicitly turn their blocker off on YouTube could be being undercounted. If so that should be fixed, for Premium viewership, as that's not really fair to anyone.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      That is hard for me to even say... 95% of my viewing is via my NVidia Shield TV box attached to my TV. I only occasionally will view a tutorial or hit YouTube Music from my computer or phone.
jowea 1y ago
Why are view counts displayed prominently in the UI then? Every suggested video shows it's view count as a sort of social proof.

monkeywork 1y ago

Why does anyone not financially motivated care about how many views a video gets? Use the like function if you want I guess . It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5

NonHyloMorph 1y ago
If you claim your counting views while simultaneoudly andvwithout disclosure don't count views of people using an adbkocker even so you could then thagvis deceiving. If it was the case I second waht the above poster hinted at: seems like a strategy to manipulate public discourse by using influencers frustration over where it hurts them (their purse) enhanced by the haunting sensation of loosing control (since they cannot know how and if they are negatively impacted by what - which makes the desire to find the cause of effect/guilty oarty/or a scapegoat) in order to disincentivice adblockers. If the articles assumptions are correct, and it is beyond googles engineering teams to fix that issue (which seems unreasonabke to assume) theb that would be a pretty (and petty) malign and antisocial policy to pursue. (Don't be evil once was a thing for good reason)
- jsnell 1y ago
  What you're ignoring is that this was a change to an ad blocker[0], not a change to the site. Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site? [0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers. [1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional.
  - chris_wot 1y ago
    Google could improve the way they serve ads. Like, one ad per “ad session”, no 5 minute ads that are longer than the video you are trying to watch, etc. They are trying to increase ad revenue, but by increased Nguyen ads and making it harder to skip them it ironically is causing much worse practices such as ad blocking.

nkrisc 1y ago

Why would anyone just watching videos on YouTube care how many people have seen the video? You enjoy it or you don’t, how many other people have seen it doesn’t change the viewing experience at all. The only people who would care are YT themselves, the creator, other creators, and advertisers. I don’t know why they even publicly display the view count.

tempestn 1y ago
Number of views and views to likes ratio are both signals of value.
- mcmoor 1y ago
  Likes to dislikes is an even better signal. Shame on YouTube for removing that.
  - tempestn 1y ago
    You can actually use a browser extension to show it still. The dislike count is still available, just not shown.
    - mcmoor 1y ago
      I've heard that it's not actual dislike count, but extrapolated data contributed from people who installed the extensions. But I've also heard that some channels have compared it to their actual dislike count and it only differs little.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  To whom? To advertisers, and the creators, of course. To viewers? How does that help inform me if I'll like it?
  - gkbrk 1y ago
    If you're looking for a tutorial, and one video has 5000 views and 4000 likes, the other has 5000 views and 2 likes, that really doesn't help inform you about which video might solve your problem better?

jefftk 1y ago

Perhaps then you should try to convince EasyList to remove the view counter from their block list? This wasn't a change YouTube made, this was adblockers choosing not to let YouTube track views for privacy purposes.

echoangle 1y ago
Well it’s not like youtube couldn’t technically track the views even with adblockers if they wanted. The video is still being streamed after all, you don’t need the client to call another endpoint to know whether it’s streaming the video.
- jefftk 1y ago
  Google built a system that tracked video views. Users installed a browser extension that intentionally breaks this tracking for privacy reasons. Why should Google do anything? They're not the one that broke it, and these users don't want to be tracked!
  - echoangle 1y ago
    Because it’s hurting creators, not viewers?
    - jefftk 1y ago
      I don't know, it's not obvious to me that YouTube should prioritize the creator's desire to track users over the user's desire not to be tracked.
    - SchemaLoad 1y ago
      Google already doesn't pay out creators for views with blocked ads, no advertiser is going to pay for ads that were never shown. The view counter doesn't matter to that. Perhaps Youtube could enforce tougher blocking of ad blockers to support creators better.
      - 1y ago

ajross 1y ago

> It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views. So... per the upthread point, paying people based on views that actually generate revenue seems fairer and more optimal, no? If YouTube can't make money from your content, why do you expect them to pay you for it?

Mond_ 1y ago
> That's emphatically not what people "people want". People want to get paid. And creators get paid based on views. That's nonsense, as a viewer of YouTube videos I do not expect to her paid for this. I guess it'd be nice if I were paid for watching YouTube, so maybe you have a point after all! :-)
- ajross 1y ago
  That's deliberately misinterpreting. The overwhelming criticism of this view count regression kerfuffle was centered around creators and the lost revenue: YouTube was pervasively accused of cooking numbers to stiff their creators. No one anywhere was arguing from the perspective of a viewer. Until it turned out that the regression was due to an adblocker change. Now suddenly creators don't matter and it's really the viewer's visibility into view counts that is the important element. And that seems... insincere.