Youtube Views Are Down (don't Panic)

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've avoided using an adblocker because, as much of a pittance as it is for content creators, I don't want to deprive them of that revenue, and I also don't want to deal with the faff of getting a working YouTube ad blocker setup.

But oh boy have the ads really slid far down the hill of enshittification in the past several months. They've gone from one ad break every ~15-20 minutes to one every ~7-10 minutes. With that, you also get an increased chance of a mid-sentence ad break (especially noticeable on older videos, where ad points have clearly been automatically retrofitted). In the past, you'd usually expect at least one of the ads to be skippable, and now, many of them seem to be fully unskippable.

To be fair, the sheer repetitiveness of the ads and their poor targeting isn't new, but it is a lot more aggravating to be shown the same completely useless ad that you saw 10 minutes ago.

(Not to mention the other enshittifications of recommendations getting even worse or the number of videos per row in search going down from 6 to 3.)

And the enshittification isn't tempting me to pay Google for a better experience; instead, it's tempting me to spend time (and perhaps coin) to other people to avoid the YouTube ads. Good job, Google.

What I noticed recently is something similar but when you browse anonymous or without being connected to a Google account.

Yup. It is now ad after ad. For me, it's long form ads too. So it would be a whole interview with some celebrity or CEO just randomly popping. Besides the Liberty Liberty nonsense, the shortest ones I am getting are whole movie trailers. It's crazy.

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.

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.

This is mentioned and linked in the article.

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.

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.

I find that shorts are constantly repeating the same ones I’ve already seen.

The “subscription” tab is the best way though.

It is awful. Recommendations either don’t surface your content at all or hyper-fixate in something you searched once.

I saw a couple of videos from a Chinese travel blogger and now I’m getting Chinese military parades, speeches by Fidel Castro and shorts with “tough guy moments” by Putin.

It’s not ideological, you can watch a bench press video next and then it’s all Joe Rogan and “feminist put in her place”.

It’s like it is programmed to give you the twisted monkey paw version of anything you wish for.

My 2 cents :

I use freetube app. It let you subscribe to channels and then show you these channel’s latest videos.

Extremely simple, no « recommendations » (I’m old enough to know what I want), and you cut back on Google ever going algorithm change.

My recommendations have always been awful, so I avoid them and just use my subscriber list instead.

But they did make a UI change in the android app that I didn't notice until very recently that I'm sure made me miss quite a few videos I would have wanted to watch. The list now has options, and doesn't default to showing videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order. Instead, it's some weirdo order that Google has decided is what you really want to watch, and that omits things. You have to tap on the "videos" tab to get the chronological list now.

It took too long for me to notice this, and it certainly meant I didn't watch videos I would otherwise have watched.

Recommendations got bad for me a year or two ago. Like, the only things on the algorithmic homescreen that I was interested in watching were already in my Watch Later list.

I'm also watching less of even the subscriptions due to the ads being so long I can make a cup of tea before they've finished, but worse they're also dispersed throughout the content and not just at the beginning.

A significant fraction of the ads are for one specific service I am not able to use anyway, so those advert buyers are wasting money to annoy me so hard and so often that I use YouTube less.

Disclaimer: this is an *hypothesis* I made, all this might be wrong:

* A social graph is built from various sources <-- this is where I wonder what the sources are, what is extracted?

* If I'm connected to Bob, I will see content related to his interests : It appears that the system tries to pick video channels related to me, but the video selection is skewed towards Bob's topics. It seems that Bob's topic embeddings are mapped to the text embeddings of video thumbnails (same for the video titles but with less weight). Since the context is small, sometimes it's off.

* If you refresh the page, it may return to your original recommendations, unless new data from external sources is fed into the algorithm. What's scare me: I wonder if the feed is in near real time. If this is the case, that's explain why my recommendation are as usual and sometimes completely off track for me but related to some people I know.

* It might buffer some topics : if you connect again with Bob but there are no new topics, it gives back the old topic related to Bob.

Once again, this is a pill of a lot of gueses.

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I really wish to go back to the previous algorithm which one of the reason I subscribed to YT premium, now it's just a minefield.

Not alone, so much GenAI content tailored to my preference, it covers exactly the topics I'm interested in, but it's clear that no human had a part in making it. It makes me watch less, just like you, and probably that's a good thing.

Anecdata, but YouTube recommendations for me are reasonable when it comes to content in English, and within non-obscure topics. The major drawback is how much it pushes popular videos that just aren't my thing.

As soon as I'm watching content in other languages, the recommendation engine has absolutely no clue what to suggest.

(I have most watch history and personalisation turned off.)

YouTube keeps recommending some AI slop factory to me that has different niche accounts but is clearly made by the same creator (red border, same looking AI woman). They have dozens of views and I keep smashing the "Don't recommend" and they keep showing up.

Whatever YouTube did in the last two months needs to be rolled back.

I wish the recommendation engine was modular - like you could somehow plugin your own algorithm. It’s always seemed poor to me.

Make this your bookmark instead: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

YouTube ReVanced has a setting to default to the subscriptions tab instead of the home tab. I turned that on a while back, and I've been a lot happier with what I see when I open the app these days.

I'd switch to grayjay, but I like a lot of the other revanced features, like automatically skipping over "like and subscribe" reminders.

Similar here. I regularly check my subscriptions, and I too noticed that lately a lot of them was never shown as a recommendation. Like maybe 20% of the videos were recommended, at most.

Instead I get even more silly stuff. Like one youtuber I'm subscribed to had an old video about anodes in water heaters. Hadn't heard about that (I've been sheltered) so viewed it. For a week after I had like 10 water heater anode videos in my recommendation list. Also more clickbait stuff, which I strongly dislike.

>and there was a "golden age"

That golden age was short lived because all our favorite websites were unprofitable and shutdown.

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.

> Not sure what happens next.

You said it:

> it's only going to get "worse"

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.

YouTube Premium has recently added a skip button for sponsored segments. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but it works pretty well.

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.

How odd, a 10/10 is usually the best rating. 10/10 of Jeff not to include this clarification.

Health insurance is still my biggest monthly expense (for a pretty terrible plan, all things considered, with no dental or vision) :(

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.

It's sorted by recency.

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.

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.