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YouTube Views Are Down Across the Board, Analysis Says (kotaku.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: For months, YouTubers have complained that their view counts are down. New data from the third-party stat tracker SocialBlade confirms what YouTubers fear: viewership is lower across the board. SocialBlade crunched some numbers for Kotaku and determined that, since the first half of the year, YouTube views are now 5-7% lower. Between July and September, that decrease was 10%. It's pretty significant. Why YouTube views have gone down is unclear, but some good theories are floating around. SocialBlade Community Manager Danny Fratella pointed to two potential causes: view audits and altered video-promoting algorithms. During view audits, YouTubers don't actually lose views. YouTube is removing botted or invalid playbacks from the view count. This happens all at once in a sort of purge -- something YouTube has explained publicly. But now that YouTubers have tools like SocialBlade to more rigorously moderate their data, they may be noticing these purges more, Fratella suggested. He added that SocialBlade doesn't see view counts purged as often as subscriber counts -- the main complaint going around YouTube communities. Although YouTubers have widely complained that fans are now randomly unsubscribed from their channels, YouTube and SocialBlade both told me that they've noticed nothing out of the ordinary in subscription data. YouTube's video-promoting algorithm may also play a role in an apparent decreased viewership. What videos the platform draws more eyes to reflects their philosophy on what videos should go viral.
I'm also seeing videos posted and shared on Facebook (ie the video is hosted by Facebook and is not a link to the original Youtube video), without attribution (and often with the very beginning and / or end cut off) with many millions of views. This must have an impact as well.
Better known as 318230.
Russian Car Crash videos.
When the ads are longer than the content, the value of watching videos there is negative.
What if it's just that watching random guy number 127693 play video games for hours is just boring after a while that people stop watching? Or random girl number 4528913 talking about her amazing life, or unboxing videos and all that useless garbage that makes up to 99% of the Internet in general?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
I'm seeing more and more ads on Youtube, and more and more, when I see an unskippable ad, I just close Youtube. It turns out that there's more than enough content out there to keep me entertained, and sitting through a 20 - 30 second ad isn't worth it.
I feel like they tweaked the recommendations, and I'm not getting as many videos coming from my subscriptions.
That said, I like getting more exposure to channels I haven't subscribed to. I found some awesome channels that way.
Perhaps people are starting to get tired of YouTube?
I do feel sorry, though, for those poor souls who may - one day - have to figure out how to earn a living doing something other than recording videos of themselves. That's certainly nice work, if you can get it...
#DeleteChrome
Are views up on Twitch and Patreon?
I can't tell how many times I've gone up to watch a "how to" video and have the video maker yak for 10 minutes or longer as an intro.
Did you know that there is a little scan bar at the bottom of the video that you can use to skip over all of that?
YouTubers have widely complained that fans are now randomly unsubscribed from their channels
Oh no!! However will western civilization survive this apocalypse?
It'll solve your problems.
You don't get much relevance any more. For example the "Trending" section only reinforces the easiest pablum on youtube. There's been a few youtube discussions of how the changing ranking system (and the change to optimum revenue for the youtuber) has pushed individual and novel content out and pushed for a churn-factory of stuff from a huge team able to produce "new content" on a regular daily basis with high production values. And the viewing pattern being rewarded is one identical to TV and to a large extent Netflix/et al: binge watching the "latest new stuff" and coming back to the channel every day for more binge watching.
Essentially turning it into TV. And killing the unique expressions that youtube can deliver for formulaic channels of huge production teams running every day, all day, for years. Something individual youtube stars (e.g. pewdiepie, despite how big he is, he's still a one-man production in front of the screen) cannot do. They can't do it for long every day without resting for some days, but if you don't have new stuff every day, you're not trending, your ranking goes down, and your revenues dry up, making it harder to come back after a break.
YouTube has lately started to crack down on certain content creators that were deemed "offensive" by certain other content creators. Without going into detail because I could really do without yet another "he said - she said" fight, and without even giving a shit whether that's a good thing or not: It was something that some people apparently wanted to see, and they're now going elsewhere to see it.
That's the beauty about the first amendment. Yes, you may speak your mind. No, you have no right to demand from me that I offer you a platform. But I, in turn, have no right to complain if you go and find another platform and take your audience with you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I tried to open a new Youtube account for something else, and had a tough time finding favorites. I have a few other accounts, all of which had Favorites from day 1, and where I had no problems, but somehow, for this, YouTube seemed to have removed the ability to add favorites to a video. I had to do a lot of exploring before I could even get to playlists, and then I added a new playlist calling it Favorites. It then showed up in my menu
Real problem is that some of these sites have programmers who just have to be kept employed, so they keep tweaking the interface, thereby breaking things that used to previously work
Why YouTube views have gone down is unclear, but some good theories are floating around. SocialBlade Community Manager Danny Fratella pointed to two potential causes: view audits and altered video-promoting algorithms.
How about endless, intrusive ads without the slightest relevance? How about annoying auto-spam video play by default? How about other video sites that offer a way more pleasant experience? How about google powerpointers should take their faces out of each other's buttholes for a moment and listen to what users are saying?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You'll typically get 30 seconds of info in 4+ minutes (Hey followers, Joe Blow here. I'm a gonna show you something you googled for, but first I'm gonna impress you with how important I am. Follow me at somewhere dot somewhere. etc etc etc). Unless a friend sends the link I never watch You-Tube. I don't have a FB account, so my friends are actually people I've had a beer with and occasionally bumped uglies with.
Did you know that there is a little scan bar at the bottom of the video that you can use to skip over all of that?
Yes, but it's a pain in the ass to try and scrub back and forth to find what you want and skipping forward or backward by 30 seconds is unreasonably difficult- it ends up moving me a minute or two which is too much. Often I just want to review the last 30 or 40 seconds, or I want to skip ahead to get to the meat of the video. After all this time Youtube still won't implement real skip controls.
Amazon video does it right- they have controls to let you skip forward and backward by 10 seconds at a time and I love it.
Netflix on the other hand only allows backwards skipping, which is just annoying.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Yeah this is why I download the video with youtube-dl and then just play it back with mpv, because I can skip backward or forward 10 seconds at a time easily.
there's shitloads of amazing commentary and criticism on youtube. Plus tons of great original animation. Go to the ExtraCreditz channel and watch the recent "Dan Recommends" series. Search for pony.mov and Brain Dump. Ever want to see anime picked apart by a film critic? Digibro. And Kim Justice's retrospectives on British computing are amazing.
This story caught me by surprise because I'm watching more youtube than regular TV these days.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I still watch a lot of youtube, but I'm not watching every single Daily Show, Sam Bee and Colbert video, and I've plum forgot about John Oliver until this post (which is a pity, he's the funniest of the bunch). Now, I have to admit that my side losing the election is a downer (though I do like what Keith Olbermann has been doing) but still, I'm definitely not watching as much as peak election.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
For years YouTube benefited from increasing customer base but the market is saturated. Just about everybody who can and would watch YouTube has.
In addition there are more and more videos competing for the same fixed pool. End result, less views per specific video.
Their best bet is to start carrying porn. In the short term it will attract attention, in the longer term they might help create more humans to watch porn.
I can't tell how many times I've gone up to watch a "how to" video and have the video maker yak for 10 minutes or longer as an intro.
It's worse when they interject personal crap throughout the video. That isn't as simple to skip as a big, long intro.
When I watch ANY Youtube video, the first thing I do is change the speed to 1.25x. After a few seconds I can then decide if 1.50x speed will suit the vocal style of the Youtuber. I just can't stand to watch videos at normal speed now that I am used to speeding it up in an attempt to get closer to speed that I could read the same information. But given that the information in a 10 minute video can usually be written as one or two paragraphs, even a sped up video can never actually reach my reading speed.
Ever since they added commercial breaks to youtube videos I have been doing anything I can to find alternate methods of viewing the same content, such as visiting the content creator's site directly and using their own video player. Often they don't use YouTube on their own site. Even if I do want to view the content, if I have to sit through an ad I automatically just think "forget it" and close the tab. I'm just sick of unskippable video-based ads.
Twinstiq, game news
Seriously.
I've had to say "Don't show me this again" to some videos HUNDREDS of times, and they still keep coming up in my suggested.
I've tried wiping my view history.
I've tried pretty much everything, and I keep getting crap I don't want to see shoveled at me, and I see very little of anything that DOES interest me outside of a few channel subs.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What can block APK spam?
* QUESTION: What've YOU personally done better that works vs. ads & numerous other threats online?
I use RequestPolicy because it's a whitelist and not a blacklist (that means threats are blocked by default, and not part of an evergrowing list of "bad" domains/IPs). I also use NoScript. For YouTube, I use youtube-dl and see no ads. That takes care of pretty much all my needs.
All those are much better than downloading proprietary software from some spammer on Slashdot.
I've seen you shotdown on requestpolicy
No, I gave you the last word, as I said, because "engaging in discussion with you is pointlessly annoying".
The followup reply was as expected, nothing of substance that didn't address my argument: "You mention speed, but give no hard numbers. If, for example, RequestPolicy does its job in less than 1ms, then it doesn't matter if a hosts file is twice as fast or even ten times as fast, because either way the difference is imperceptible. I don't have any speed problems using RequstPolicy, at all."
The reply makes an empty claim about security, but doesn't address the whitelist vs blacklist argument, open source vs untrustworthy proprietary source, or cross-platform benefits.
FAKE NAME
Says the spammer who posts as Anonymous Coward and self-signs "apk".
NoScript? Hosts block adserver script sources
So does RequestPolicy, and NoScript stops all scripts, including ones on the mainpage. All this makes for a very fast web.
If I follow a few YT links from a non-YT site, all those videos show the same adds, even without the 'skip in 4 seconds' possibility.
I have lost interest completely after seeing the same add 3 times, and start vowing to never buy the product shown in the add. That can not be the effect the add company is after.
Where are YOUR 'hard #s?
I don't need a hard number, as I'm not trying to sell shit on a stick. You offer no numbers, but make claims. I notice no slowdowns. In fact, web is very fast without all the extra crud, including no scripts on the main page (another thing your hosts method doesn't fix).
Hosts do a form of it
Pathetic. Ads and malware hosts are constantly shifting. You offer no solution to this except as an after-the-fact reaction. Whitelisting stops all of them, by default. Hosts is inferior.
I cut off my local DNS service? I literally HAVE the same whitelisting you do
Huh? Any site I intentionally click is "whitelisted". If you cut off your DNS, then you can't get to that site unless it's in your local cache. Not the same, and I highly doubt you operate that way.
Anyways, apk, as usual your idiocy is plain for all to see, and I tire of responding to your bullshit. You may again have the last word and continue to be a legend in your own mind.