YouTube Views Are Down Across the Board, Analysis Says (kotaku.com) 122
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.
Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
One reason I skip youtube videos is the enforced commercials. I don't mind a click to skip commercial, as most of the time I don't want to buy a new car and have no interest in the advert.
When the commercial takes more than 5 seconds, it will finish after I have left to view something else.
There are only so many (Score:3)
Russian Car Crash videos.
Re:There are only so many (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
When the ads are longer than the content, the value of watching videos there is negative.
Re: (Score:2)
I block the ads on my PC but can't block them on my smart TV. I have found though that hitting 'back' cancels the ad. Do it once or twice and you're able to watch the video. I haven't seen any 2 min ads over here, but it's worked for 1 min ones, and i routinely do it for the 15-30 secs long ads.
Re: (Score:1)
If you own the content, you get decide whether ads play and the type of ad.
So if you have sit through long ads, then you should blame the uploader or unsubscribe to that user.
If you are watching content where the copyrighted is owned by someone else, then the ads are controlled by them. In which cases, you can blame the Music company or the video production company who has claimed the copyright.
As far as I know, youtube does not force any ads onto the video and instead just controls ads in the margins.
Same adds (Score:1)
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.
Boring (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Come on! Random girl number 4528913 is pretty good. She is super Hot!
Wait, sorry, I was thinking of random girl number 452891*4*. You should definitely check her out.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
You are grossly underestimating millenials. Entertaining them is like feeding pigs: It's a mess and they always want more waste. Youtubers are not going to disappear anytime soon. Maybe mutate, but not disappear.
You're nuts (Score:4, Informative)
This story caught me by surprise because I'm watching more youtube than regular TV these days.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I was expecting your link to "see anime picked apart by a film critic" to be by a real film critic having fun ripping on it. Instead, it was an anime fan who reviews animes because he loves it.
Too many ads (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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 l
Re: (Score:2)
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
get ublock origin, breh (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
There are ads on youtube? When did this start? /oblig
Re: (Score:2)
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 use Adblock and I haven't seen an ad on Youtube in a year or two. Even the videos with 20 ads spaced every 3 minutes apart throughout the video never appear.
The trend I've noticed is that videos are longer...most of the videos used to be 5- or 10-minutes long, now they're 20 or 25 minutes. I just don't want to watch stuff for that long unless it's something I'm really, really interested in. There are a few channels with long videos that I like, but most of the 20-minute videos could be done in 5 minutes.
Re: (Score:3)
What can block APK spam?
Re: (Score:2)
* QUESTION: What've YOU personally done better that works vs. ads & numerous other threats online?
I use RequestPolicy [github.io] 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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 ma
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently, there's even a Chrome Extension [github.com].
Re: (Score:2)
On computers, use ad blockers. Don't know about mobile, smart TVs, and others.
Re: (Score:2)
Also I've not seen many people mention that streaming services, for me mainly Twitch, is a thing now? For me I use both with regularity. Seems pretty obvious that if the live streaming services like Twitch gaining market share that will eat into YouTube.
Overall I view that as a good thing. We need less monopolies in the computer
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Those commercial breaks (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I came to post just this. I am not going to sit and watch a 30 second ad to watch some video I clicked on from Reddit.
Re: (Score:2)
YouTubeRed and haven't looked back.
Tweaked recommendations (Score:2)
That said, I like getting more exposure to channels I haven't subscribed to. I found some awesome channels that way.
Re: (Score:2)
They did, you have to click on the bell and fix it. It lets them push their sponsored corporate content more, and obviously it is at the expense of the bulk of youtubers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They didnt tweak anything, they FIXED it. There is a subscription page dedicated to listing videos you subscribe to.
Maybe, just maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:1)
No kidding. And unfortunately there's a ton of YouTube spam clogging up Google results lately. With technical things especially, I find that when I do a search, a lot of the top results are YouTube videos. If I search for a jQuery command I don't want to get back a dozen "Lern 2 make ur websit on jqery" videos. When I do a search about the latest cryptolocker variant, I really really don't want to wade through YouTube videos of some 13 year old talking about viruses, or some sketchy looking auto generated v
Re: (Score:2)
search string: jquery tutorial -youtube
fixed that minor typo for you.
favorites (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
And to add to this : I don't want to hear you saying "Wassup guys?" at the start of your video, because I'll kill the tab immediately if you do that.
Re: (Score:1)
The female youtube attention whores can change over to being just whores.
Re: (Score:2)
Doubt it. I think the total views isn't changing. We're just diluting the pool through more and more worthless youtube celebrities.
Are views up on Twitch and Patreon? (Score:1)
oh no! (Score:1)
YouTubers have widely complained that fans are now randomly unsubscribed from their channels
Oh no!! However will western civilization survive this apocalypse?
It's their marketing of videos (Score:1)
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 ex
Youtube just didn't want to be "controversial" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Once people hesitate to upload or have to consider every word they will more to more fun US sites that offer freedom from teams of SJW.
Freedom of speech was the only thing that the USA offered a site. With a more global outlook and SJW, hero teams trying to remove all fun, any creative sites brand will slip.
Sites that offer freedom of speech and the freedom to comment will
Reason is unclear... really?? (Score:2)
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 [vimeo.com] 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?
I don't like to watch video on my laptop (Score:3)
Isn't this just the election ending? (Score:2)
Saturation (Score:2)
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.
Youtube's suggestion algorithm is fucked up. (Score:2)
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.