Youtube Addresses Lower View Counts Which Seem to Be Caused by Ad Blockers

My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.

Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.

Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.

If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.

I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.

Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.

1. It seems views from Premium users who use adblock might also not get counted—and I'm not sure if the revenue from a Premium view in that circumstance would be counted or not (more research needed).

2. YouTube's recommendation engine weights views heavily in the system, which means channels with a more technical, traditional desktop viewing audience (probably a substantial portion of HN users) will be most impacted, and will not be able to grow an audience to help fund projects, yadda yadda.

YouTube creators with younger, mobile, less FOSS-y, and less tech-savvy audiences are therefore rewarded with more views/mindshare.

I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum", but I think that discounts the helpful work of many tech creators. Not only in direct contributions to open source projects, but also in being a voice to balance out the paid 'product showcase' style videos for many tech products that come to market.

In other words: if adblock users disincentivize creators like me from spending time and resources on YouTube, then video content will more quickly settle into the online magazine/news status quo, where 99% of the articles you read are just PR spin. Which you could argue would bring about YouTube's downfall earlier... or would lead us even more quickly to an Idiocracy-style society :D

I'm not saying adblock is bad or wrong or anything—I can't stand the YT ad spam, so I pay for Premium. To each their own. In any case, YouTube shoulders some of the burden, but will be the main entity to profit in any scenario.

I don't know... To me, it just seems like a textbook move from a Corporate Abuse Playbook. I bet someone at Google is laughing about it right now.

while true, choosing to base your income on the wellbeing of a company and its ad placement, no matter how well your video does or how good you are at producing videos is absolute insanity to me.

You become a slave to the latest monetization techniques and if you don't adopt them your revenue goes down, and your videos get put in front of fewer people, resulting in less income. This is bizarre to me, and definitely unwanted, because the things you need to do will never stop ramping up. A video used to do better because the thumbnail had a reaction face on it, now it's required just to keep your view count where it normally should be. People got used to that, and now ignore it. But it's still required if you want to get your video in front of people.

Now thumbnails must be rotated out frequently for the first few days of a video's life until the thumbnail which results in the most views is found. Soon people will become immune to this tactic just like they became immune to the reaction faces, and something new will come up to replace it. Except you don't stop with the reaction faces and the thumbnail rotation, you have to keep doing those.

Advertising requires this constant escalation to counter people's ever-increasing ability to ignore advertisements, and this will never stop so long as revenue determines how often a video is placed on the youtube.com homepage for a given viewer. it will never stop until advertisement is no longer a thing at all. a content creator must continually escalate what they are doing in order to stay right where they are in viewership, and even then they are subject to constant drops in revenue because of the whims of Google and advertising partners.

The whole thing is absolutely insane and I can't understand why someone would choose this to be their primary source of income. If people didn't choose to make youtube a career, there would be far fewer ads on youtube, because people would not be fighting so hard for views.

Same with twitter.

Considering I have zero interest in this stuff it seems their algorithm pushes such trash by cross-referencing with the closest thing possible - even by a digital picometer distance.

I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.

I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.

This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).

My recommendations are entirely in line with what I watch. I never need to check channels i like for a new video because they automatically get recommended.

If yours is a sewage firehouse, are you logged in? Or are you sharing your account with family members who watch what you consider "sewage"?

And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.

That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.

I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.

So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.

And lately they're starting to get more malicious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHW24jOYVw