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.

Comments

Facebook

[Dan East]

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.

Re:Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I see it more and more and it pisses me off because both vlc and smplayer can play youtube videos simply by drag-n-drop from my browser. I can't do the same with facebook videos so I really notice when someone links to a facebook video instead of a youtube video, it much more of a hassle to view. I usually just skip it.

There are only so many

[bobstreo]

Russian Car Crash videos.

Re:There are only so many

[thegarbz]

This but on a wider scale. Youtube has become a cesspool. Every topic has many hundreds of presenters with potentially thousands for more popular topics. Take video game reviews. On the day of the Super Mario Run release there were already several thousand videos online with playthroughs, thoughts, reviews, rants etc.

I myself have stopped watching many of my staple channels as searches just return the same kind of content and the first video is often good enough.

We've reached peak attention but the number of players keep increasing, diluting the market share.

Forced ads

[Anonymous Coward]

When the ads are longer than the content, the value of watching videos there is negative.

Boring

[lorinc]

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?

Too many ads

[hawguy]

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.

Re:Too many ads

[iplayfast]

I agree. when Youtube first started there were no ads, and the veiwership skyrocketed. Then they added ads, and it flattened out. Then the added more ads and it went down. Seems straight forward to me.

Tweaked recommendations

[djinn6]

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.

Maybe, just maybe

[93 Escort Wagon]

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...

Re:Maybe, just maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps people are starting to get tired of YouTube?

I don't want to sit though your 5 minute theme song to learn out to adjust a parking brake.

I want to watch the trailer for the newest movie, not see your, someone I don't know and don't care about's reaction to it.

I want to watch a clip from the Simpsons. Not watch it in Spanish, or watch you video pointed at your TV.

Youtube needs to fix their volumes. It's really annoying to have one video really quite then have the next video blast my ear drums off.

get ublock origin, breh

[Rujiel]

It'll solve your problems.

Youtube just didn't want to be "controversial"

[Opportunist]

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.

favorites

[unixisc]

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

I don't like to watch video on my laptop

[Snotnose]

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.

You're nuts

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:AdBlock = inferior + 'souled-out' vs. hosts

[Raenex]

What can block APK spam?