Hey Reader,

Last October, I published a blog about "views." It's really good, you should read it if you haven't already. It's called "How Many Views Does It Take To Go Viral." In case you don't want to take a tangent to blogtown, please allow me to quote the important part of the article below.

Well, less than 12 months after I posted that blog, YouTube has made a major change that invalidates the quote above. Last week, the suits behind the largest video platform announced that the way views are counted is changing.

The Change

Starting today, August 24th, YouTube will now count a view as soon as the first frame of a video plays, no matter that platform. That means the instant a video begins, whether it was chosen by a viewer, ran as an ad, or moused over by a user to play a preview, a view will be counted. In case you were curious, the first frame of a video lasts between 1/24th and 1/60th of a second. The average NHL goalie has a reaction time of about .10-.15 seconds; a frame at 24fps lasts for .04 seconds. 2.5 frames of a video would pass by before a professional goaltender could react to it, but in YouTube's eyes, that could be 2.5 whole views.

YouTube also announced a new metric which debuted alongside this change to views. The new metric is called "Engaged Views" and will track what YouTube used to consider a view, roughly 30 seconds of watch time. Unfortunately, the new "Engaged View" metric will only be visible from the backend. You'll be able to see the "Engaged Views" of a video you upload, but when you're browsing the platform, only the new view count will be displayed.

The Impact

On the surface, this change may not sound impactful. It's just another way to make number go up, right? Who care's if everyone's view counts get inflated? Please allow me to quote directly from the Forbes article linked above.

It's that last line that matters. "Public view totals are likely to rise, particularly for videos that lose audiences early." Sure, everyone's videos will now count views from the first frame, but the benefit isn't equal. Small creators with dedicated viewers and channels producing consistent long form content likely won't see huge spikes in their numbers. The accounts that will see huge spikes are those who produce low-quality, click-bait videos. Previously, a YouTube video with a high view count insinuated that viewers found the content of a high enough quality to stick with. Now when hundreds of thousands of people click on a video only to discover that it's misleading, uninteresting, or worse, offensive, that video will still rack up hundreds of thousands of views. Even if everyone of those users closed that video within its first second, those views are still counted.

It should go without saying, but this change delegitimizes the value of a view on YouTube. It also makes view counts far easier to manipulate. Fake views and view count boosting are issues that have plagued YouTube since its inception. Notably, the manipulation of view counts demolished the YouTube Kids algorithm in 2017, leading to an event called "Elsagate."

Who Wanted This

When analyzing a company's business decisions, the first question I ask is, "Who wanted this change?" So who benefits from this change and what do they get from it? The answer, in this situation, is crystal clear: YouTube's Ad Sales department.

Let me tell you a quick story. After college, a buddy and I started a YouTube channel. We posted videos of ourselves playing obscure video games. We didn't get a ton of views, but our friends and families watched our content and we enjoyed doing it. One day, a video we posted the week before popped off. It brought in 10x the views of any of our other videos and we had no idea why. Well, after diving into the analytics, we discovered that a game developer had actually paid YouTube to run our video of their game as an ad. So when someone pulled up a video game-adjacent video to watch, our 15 minute video might populate as the ad roll before their selected video.

We posted that video nearly 10 years ago, long before YouTube changed how views were counted. Still, we pulled in a ton of extra views and the game developer (hopefully) felt justified in their ad spend. Now imagine how much bigger those numbers would be under the new definition of a "view." Maybe, instead of a 10x increase in views, we would see a 100x increase in views. Maybe, instead of feeling justified in their ad spend, the game developer would find it imperative to spend even more.

​Inflation is bad most of the time, (the jury is still out on breast augmentation) but it's at it's worst when it deceives the public of what they're getting. The only people who truly benefit from YouTube's change are the people trying to deceive.

-MC

p.s.

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