TubeTalk: Your YouTube How-To Guide

YouTube Views are down, here is why.

• vidIQ • Season 6 • Episode 42

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YouTube creators experienced a mysterious drop in views around mid-August while their ad revenue remained surprisingly stable. The culprit was YouTube's battle with ad blockers causing desktop views to disappear from analytics while leaving monetization unaffected.

• Desktop viewers using ad blockers suddenly stopped being counted in view metrics
• Views dropped approximately 30% for many creators, particularly those with tech-savvy audiences
• Despite lower view counts, ad revenue remained stable since ad-blocked views never generated revenue anyway
• Engagement metrics like likes-per-view increased, suggesting core engaged audience remained
• Josh Strife Hayes collected data from 80+ channels to identify the desktop viewer correlation
• YouTube liaison Rene Ritchie confirmed ad blockers were affecting view count accuracy
• Tech channels were hit hardest while gaming channels with younger audiences saw minimal impact
• This appears to be just the beginning of YouTube's ongoing battle with ad blocking technology
• Creators don't need to change their content strategy as this is a platform-level analytics issue


Speaker 1:

So it wasn't restricted mode, it wasn't AI, it wasn't any of those things. We're going to tell you exactly what the problem was right now. Welcome back to the only podcast that comes to you when something breaking happens. Because it's broken, get it. What a pun that was.

Speaker 1:

I'm Travis and I'm here with Dan. Hey, you're good at puns, I'm punny, but today's subject is not punny. It is about how we're all canceled. It's over for us. Youtube has crashed. It's dead. We're done.

Speaker 1:

This is our last video. It's been nice. Thanks everybody for using youtube. It's over. It's been over. Yeah, that no one's getting views anymore. It's terrible. It's a terrible time on youtube, not really so.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot going on. There's a lot of um. There's some truth to some of the things you may have heard recently, which is you's a lot going on. There's a lot of um. There's some truth to some of the things you may have heard recently, which is you know, a lot of big youtubers are talking about how their views are down, and smaller youtubers as well, every every youtuber. There's a lot of different youtubers, and then there's some that are like no, nothing's nothing's changed. Probably reasons for this. We're going to get into some of those reasons today.

Speaker 1:

Today's uh video is all about views on youtube, which is what you all care about. But something's been going on lately and, for those of you who have not been paying attention, a couple of larger creators have recently stated that since about mid-August of this year, views have been declining for their channels, and this happens from time to time on YouTube for a variety of reasons. The ones that are normal are seasonal, in other words, certain times of the year you can bet on views being terrible, january being one of those. Beginning of summertime, a lot of time is the other, and then going back to school around September actually, ironically, around this time would be a third. But this is different. There's different markers in this that are kind of showing that something different is going on. Dan, when did you first hear about this latest controversy about views going down and what do you remember? Because, again, this was a couple of weeks ago when it kind of started, but we're starting to see the videos now.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I think right around when Linus uploaded their podcast clip about it. Someone sent it to me and I watched it, and you know it's hard to know in the moment if you're looking at a channel that is complaining about views on their end and they have a lot the stakes are high over there. They have a bunch of employees and people who work on that channel. The channel is the lifeblood of the whole operation, and so if it's going down, they have to be concerned, and this points to an issue that I believe them that they were having this issue, but I didn't quite see it yet as like a widespread sort of thing. I think it was the catalyst, though, but maybe someone else was already tapping into this. They just weren't as big.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to show a real quick clip of that particular podcast episode you're talking about and I definitely recommend watching if you have not already seen it, or at least parts of it anyway, because as a YouTuber, it's interesting stuff when he explains, ultimately after saying like the views are down and we're seeing some weird things, and again, this was kind of early on, so he didn't really have a lot of information.

Speaker 3:

Some of his conclusions I thought it's pretty interesting. Here we go. So it's it's a little confusing right now, but you know, it's one of those things where youtube always tells us you know, uh, when, wherever you would say algorithm, you have to say audience, where you're trying to sort of diagnose, you know what you need to do to help the channel performance. And so we've got to ask ourselves okay, well, what is it about? Whether it's our packaging or whether it's our content that is not delighting our audience?

Speaker 1:

Now this is 99% of the case when you see views going down on a channel. So let me set the stage again. In this podcast, right before all this, he's talking about how the numbers went down about 30 or so percent, just kind of out of nowhere. And in this particular part of the podcast he's reflecting on the possibility that it is just that channel and he does go through some of the reasons that it could be the channel like they. They've changed a little bit of the format, they had some controversies in the past, all these different things and he's kind of rationalizing it in the way that we would normally tell a channel hey, it's probably you right, you fell off. You fell off and I thought that was really first of all.

Speaker 1:

I thought that was, I respected that, because that's not typically the thing you want to think of as a creator. You think mostly like, well, I didn't change anything, everything was working. All of a sudden it stopped working. Nine times out of ten Must be YouTube's fault. Yeah, nine times out of ten, that's what we think. Nine times out of ten. What he just said is the facts. It's maybe we did something, maybe we didn't change something, maybe there's things going on. People are interested in other things, that sort of thing. So I liked that he came to that conclusion and that was early on and I think by this point in the podcast I was like, yeah, that's probably it, and I just stopped kind of paying attention. Do you remember, uh, that part of of that conversation and kind of what you thought when you heard that?

Speaker 4:

uh, yeah, I remember pretty well, like some of the controversies surrounding him and it made sense. I I kind of, as I was listening that part, I kind of had forgotten that this was something they were talking about. That was sudden, so my brain was kind of back to. This has probably been coming for a really long time. You know, this channel's been around forever and any channel's been around forever is going to just kind of, you know, have to continue to innovate, and if they don't, what's going to happen? But in in that channel's case in particular, there's there's reasons people don't watch anymore. Uh, and I'm not trying to get into the controversy, I'm just saying that is a thing. There are people who don't watch for reasons. So and they admitted that, they admit that they talk about that a little bit. So it it was like, yeah, this is probably them just out loud saying it's time to make a change and what it gets into from there, what it brought me back to. Oh right, this was a sudden thing.

Speaker 1:

This is actually like a little bit bigger than just hey, people don't like us anymore one of the things that when I did a lot of coaching for creators is having that outside look at at their content. It's hard to separate yourself from your content because you spend so much time doing it. Um, and, like I said, the respect is you are the producer, the editor, the script writer, all the things. You're all these things, the talent, everything all in one. So it is very difficult at times to be very rational about your product, which is your videos, saying, yeah, this one wasn't as good, or these three weren't as good, or I'm actually trying something new, so I should expect views to go down. The rationalization is accurate, like, yeah, well, okay, maybe I am doing something wrong. However, as it turns out, some more people kind of dove into this and there were a lot of other YouTubers that started saying, well, wait a minute. There are other things we're seeing about this that are happening to multiple people at the same time during the same date range.

Speaker 1:

One of the first things that people started to pull up uh, was restricted mode talking about. Now, we've talked about restricted mode a couple of times here. I'm going to use a little clip from uh, the spiffing brit. Uh, he talks a little bit about restricted mode. We're going to watch this little segment right here, just to use a little clip from the spiffing Brit. He talks a little bit about restricted mode. We're going to watch this little segment right here just to get a little bit of feedback on what he talked about for it and also, if you don't know what it is, it'll give a little bit of information. We'll give the rest once his segment is over. So let's get to that.

Speaker 2:

I don't think most people know what restricted mode is. It's a feature that wasn't added in September. It's a feature that wasn't even added in August. It's been a part of YouTube since, probably before you started using the platform. It's a feature that exists to restrict potentially mature content from being shown. Its sole purpose is so that places like schools and libraries can have access to YouTube without the fear that a child is watching a GTA 5 let's Play because the game is technically for adults. It's not perfect. There's definitely a lot of videos that slip through the cracks, but it's a good enough change to make a very big platform slightly safer for kids. In 2017, restricted mode accounted for a mere 1.5 percent of views on the platform, and I honestly expect this number to be even lower now, as it's really not a popular feature.

Speaker 1:

Restricted mode is not the cause for less views and you know his conclusion is not the cause for less views. I agree with this because in the past we have found channels that are highly popular, um voice critical being one of those. That's almost his entire channel is almost completely in restricted mode. So, again for people who didn't understand what was just said there, there is an option, uh, in your, when you're on youtube, in your login, to turn on restricted mode, and what that does is it finds um videos that would be quote inappropriate for usually kids of you know, like if you're in a library, like you don't want to see all the shenanigans and whatnot, and it keeps them from showing up. And sure, that does mean that certain videos won't show up for certain people, but it's such a small percentage of people that that was never the thing. And the reason that this, this subject came up was because recently youtube had made some type of announcement about using ai to try to figure out if videos would were recommended for kids right, it was per.

Speaker 4:

As I understood, it was per user. It was trying to determine, based on your viewing habits, whether or not you were of age to see certain content. Are you 18 or are you not 18? Excuse me.

Speaker 4:

And this criticism comes from, like you know, people watching all kinds of stuff, people have different interests, and so where is it getting the data on what is a kid's video, what's not? And I think it's natural to assume and I still don't know if it's this way or not that videos in restricted mode are likely the ones that would be safe for all ages, via this same new, this new system, right? So people are saying that if your video is in restricted mode, then if so, facto, this is the new youtube update that kind of screwed everything up because nobody was using restricted mode and now it's on by default. I don't think that's true. I don't think restricted mode is what. I don't think youtube just turns that on. If your account is child account, a lot of things change all of a sudden. It's not just that it just automatically turns on restricted mode.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, even in the video it says restricted mode is turned off by default. Yes, the thing is again. This has been around since 2010. This is not a new feature, it's just the AI it conflated. The problem was this announcement of using AI to kind of figure out certain content.

Speaker 1:

Stuff happened around the same exact time that these views started to drop, and there's like a date range of, like August 9th through the 12th Some people were saying the 10th, some people say like between the 9th and 12th. Somewhere around there, people started seeing like this thing happen whatever this thing is and we'll talk more in depth about what it looks like here in a second but a lot of people conflated this with that, and this happens a lot. Uh, first of all, in life, let's be honest, but on youtube especially, like something will happen and people who maybe don't understand the platform as well will point at something, and then when someone hears something, they'll jump on that like, oh yeah, that makes sense, without doing any research or anything, and then it becomes a talking point. Yep, and from youtube's side, a lot of times, they don't ever get around to denying anything, which makes it worse.

Speaker 4:

That makes people think, yep that's it and what makes it hard for people in our situation, because we didn't jump on this right away. When it comes to youtube updates, when it's coming from the horse's mouth, we jump on updates pretty quickly. When it's about situations that we're all trying to like learn about in real time, we tend to take our time a little bit more. We don't react to them right away, and this was something that I was watching on the sidelines very carefully because I'm like I don't think it's that simple.

Speaker 4:

But when enough people are saying it's got to be restricted mode and in the, the creators are getting larger and larger and I'm like I respect these creators, I watch them regularly and they're saying it too. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe restricted mode isn't on default for me, but maybe they're testing that. Like I'm running through all these different scenarios in my head because I don't work at youtube I just I felt relatively confident. It was definitely not restricted mode, it was definitely not aih verification, but I'm not saying these things out loud because I'm just taking it all in and I'm really glad we waited because, as we'll get to um, yes, uh, it's it's.

Speaker 1:

It turned out to be not those things, as far as people can tell and the other thing is like we almost shot this yesterday and then another piece of information came out and I was like we just gotta damn, we just gotta wait an extra day because, yeah, it's constantly changing and by the time people hear this, maybe even more comes out. But I think at this point I feel like we have enough of a solid kind of basis. Eventually we're gonna get there, trust me. We just want to lay the foundation of everything so you can understand and be informed. Yeah, because I think it's important to understand this stuff. The next time something like this happens and it's not every every year or so something happens and views go down, people panic, youtube's broken, blah, blah, blah. So we're trying to analyze it real time, show you what's going on, and so all that to say restricted mode and and ai uh, age verification nothing to do with this, nothing to do with this, um. So while that was going on, I started seeing other creators uh, in some of the niches I watch kind of start saying the same thing, like yeah, my views are down too, and and really interesting that, like um, even on our channel we saw it. I can't go into too much detail because it's it would be a whole episode in of itself, um, but we kind of saw the same thing. Unfortunately, some of our data was a little bit dirty so it was hard for us to actually notice it in the moment, but as we look back, we can kind of see similar-ish things, but we weren't as affected as some of these other channels. I think there is a really good reason why specific channels seem to be affected. Again, we'll get to that in a minute.

Speaker 1:

So, all that being said, there was another podcast. Uh, linus did again, and you know they kind of think they figured out some really interesting aspects of why their views are down. We'll watch. Uh, this thing happen, uh, and this isn't everything this, this episode has, um, or at least, this clip is like 30 minutes long. We're only gonna listen a minute or two, but there's a lot of interesting information. They pulled up some which I think is probably irrelevant. One thing they did not do is show their audience uh breakout, which they should have. But here's some.

Speaker 3:

Here's a particularly, particularly interesting segment that they did talk about right like these two graphs track really really closely with each other until suddenly, at the beginning of august, they decouple all right, and I'm going to explain what this graph is.

Speaker 1:

If you're looking at the youtube video, you're going to see this is a graph that one of the people who works for Linus put together. This became one of the first clues as to what was going on. This is the views expected versus the revenue they got per view and per video. What's interesting is what you would normally expect, which is what most of this graph shows is the more views you got, the more money you make. Duh like hello. Everyone knows this. But what was interesting is is in this August timeframe, they still were getting as much money as they were normally, but they were getting less views. That was the biggest monkey wrench in all of this. When this was found out and then people saw this information and they started checking, they're like yeah, this is the same for me. And there was another thing likes were up compared to views, so you were getting many more likes per view than you were before this august date. This was very confusing. What were your thoughts as this information was shared?

Speaker 4:

so the thought I had immediately when they mentioned, especially when they mentioned likes- was that okay, if your revenue and engagement are not changing, relatively speaking, video after video, that means the views you're losing here are not real. That was my thought. Right, like you are getting bots on your channel, we all probably are and youtube has done something about the bots and, at least temporarily, this is what's going to look like now. The reason that my mind went to that so fast was because over on twitch, they very publicly just did a thing where they flipped a switch and got rid of a lot of bots and if you go and look, there's all kinds of stories about this. Twitch's numbers are through the floor compared to where they were because of this purge, this bot purge.

Speaker 4:

Now I do think that eventually it'll pick back up. I think these, these bot companies, are companies. They're scrappy, they, they, they want to make their money and they're going to figure it out. So I'm thinking like everyone's making a big to do it. Nothing. Youtube got rid of fake views and that that's where my mind was and I was pretty set on that. Again, still not making a video here, but IQ about it still.

Speaker 1:

I felt like so I'm going to talk about, because you know, they didn't get to this part about the financial stuff till later. In the podcast earlier on they talked about how the likes were higher. I was thinking, well, okay, yeah, if they get rid of these fake views, your likes per view are going to be higher, because the people who are liking your video are people who are the hardcores that are watching all of your stuff anyway. So that actually makes sense. So, like I was unmoved by that bit of data, I was like, yeah, of course you're going to have higher likes per view Makes sense to me. When he said that he was making as much money with less views there are very few things on youtube that I don't have an explanation for, dan, that was one of them. When he said that I'm like I don't know, this is a new one on me uh, because it doesn't make a lot of sense. You should be getting more views, uh, and getting more revenue for those views. If your views go down, inevitably your revenue does as well. But after kind of listening to a bit, I started to kind of think the way you did, which is, some of these views aren't like real or whatever, whatever you want to call them. Um, I think when something like this, first of all, I can't remember anything like this ever happening before, and you know, linus has been around for many years. They say they've never seen like this before. So so when things like this happen, when we get something new, a new piece of data we've never seen before, my first thing is to go okay, let's hold on. Who else can verify this? Who else has the same exact situation?

Speaker 1:

Thankfully, these larger channels were bringing it to the attention of a lot of creators, who watched them, and they came forward. Channels were bringing it to the attention of a lot of creators, who watched them, and they came forward and it was an actual thing. A lot of people had less views but had the same amount of money. So for some people who make youtube videos for certain reasons like money only they're like okay, well then, there's nothing wrong, nothing's broken. But for others, the thing is, views are important to when you're a bigger channel, to sponsors. So as long as the money keeps coming in, as long as sponsors don't care, then it's fine.

Speaker 1:

But if you are and they even mention this in the video a sponsor and you're like yeah, I mean last time, last video, you got a million views and we paid money and it was good. Now you're getting 500 000 views. I don't know we want to pay you as much money. That's a little rough on the creator. It's like, well, wait a minute, what's going on? Like I haven't done anything different. So it is a big impact and a big issue, even though the ad sense money hasn't changed. Overall, money can and, like we say on this podcast a lot, ad sense money is just a drop in the bucket. Um, did you, did you or any of your friends or any of the people that you kind of hang out with, uh, youtuber wise see the same thing happen? Were they seeing views up down? Did the money stay the same? What did you experience?

Speaker 4:

yeah, I'm in. I'm in a couple discords and stuff and, uh, one one in particular. It's full of youtube creators. Everyone in there was talking about this. They were all saying their views were down and it was just kind of funny to watch these channels that are very big by the way, some of them you've heard of for sure, millions of subscribers in some cases talking and and conspiracy, conspiracy theorying, like the rest of us, right, like, just like youtube must have changed this or that.

Speaker 4:

And, yes, everyone's noticing there's also a few people in the discord who were like, um, actually having a pretty good month, and those the the one there was one particular that said that. That I, I know, I've talked to, and they are a gaming channel. So, uh, I'm talking to. This is discord, full of creators of all different kinds of channels and, of course, like this one gaming channel is like I'm doing pretty good and, uh, knowing what I know now, I feel like that makes a lot of sense. But, uh, yeah, we'll get into it, but, yes, uh, in the moment yeah, a lot of people noticed around me yeah, and it's.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting because that because it doesn't make any sense. It then makes you question everything. I feel like at that point we're being gaslit and the only thing we wanted is for YouTube to tell us anything. And nine times out of ten, youtube won't say anything. It's just like they just genuinely and generally don't. Sometimes they will, depending on what's going on, but for the most part, it's my opinion that their default answer is no answer. Sometimes it might be because they can't answer, other times it might be because they don't have an answer yet. Um, but I feel like, in instances where I don't know, something like this is so impactful that they should say something like we're looking into it, or I don't know, anything like this is so impactful that they should say something like we're looking into it or I don't know anything. Now, we'll get into a minute. They did eventually say something, but I think it would have been easier and better to say at least we're looking into it.

Speaker 1:

A week or two ago, when you know, stuff like this was blowing up and I this is one of the things about youtube is very frustrating. One of my uh, one of my friends and a fellow creator has been around for a long time. Jonathan Morrison, big tech YouTuber, just got demonetized recently. He's got 2.7 million subscribers. He got demonetized because he's trying to change the bank account in his AdSense not because of any of his content, but because of like a glitch, like it wouldn't let him change the bank or something, and when he did try to change it, because it was broken a connection to like his account. Now he's demonetized across a two million subscriber channel. It's been around for like 10 years or something and he's not getting help. They're like you gotta wait 30 days or something.

Speaker 1:

It's just, it's a. It's a very weird partnership that you have with youtube. It's it's one-sided. You don't generally know what the heck's going on and there's not anyone you can specifically talk to. You know what I mean, dan. Do you feel this way with? I was thinking Rob. Second time you call me Rob, yeah, sorry. Do you feel this way, dan, about like it's not a parasocial relationship, that's different. That's with us and our viewers, but it's a different relationship.

Speaker 4:

It's like almost as bad it. I'm numb to it at this point. I feel like it's because youtube is such a massive corporation at this point that and google and they can't say much. They can't say much about this and I think the reason this is my own tinfoil hat, but I think the reason they don't say anything most of the time is because they are trying to, first and foremost, protect their company secrets, which I'm sure there's plenty of, given their algorithms are so advanced at this point. They have to be careful and I think a lot of stuff runs through lawyers before it runs through anything. It's almost amazing that they have a social media account to begin with. It's not surprising that a lot of it is copy-paste, because those are the messages that are likely approved by lawyers.

Speaker 4:

And when you talk to platforms like Twitch on Twitter or something like that, I don't know if they're the best example. I don't really follow them on social media, but I think people have you know real people behind them A lot of time. They have experience talking to real people at these companies, whereas with YouTube, it takes a lot of time to get a real person you have to really like. I think the most frustrating thing for me is when somebody is obviously being you know something is happening to their channel. That is not fair and everyone can see. It's not fair and it only ever gets attention when that youtuber who is big enough goes and makes a hubbub and their viewers make a hubbub or they just happen to get the attention of a big creator who makes a hubbub on their behalf and I hate. I don't even go on twitter anymore. Twitter is not my platform anymore. I hate that. That is the way to get a problem solved on this platform. That is frustrating, but it makes sense because of just how massive Google is at this point.

Speaker 1:

A couple of years ago, and this was before Shorts, the stat was 500 hours of content uploaded every minute on YouTube. This was before youtube shorts. I don't even know what it could possibly be now. It's got to be like 2 000 hours a minute, something like that, something ridiculous. First of all, who's buying all the hard drives? But I I think that it is a problem because it's hard to. How do you service all these people, some of which are genuine creators that, um, need help, and a lot of which are genuine creators that need help, and a lot of them are people who either A just don't understand the system and are kind of clogging up customer service, who can even get through to a customer service, right, but, like at a certain channel size, you don't even get a chance at that. Or people that are trying to scam the company, or something like that. You know what I mean. So there's all these things you have to wade through, but you're right, like it takes a lot of times a big creator before something really seemingly gets done.

Speaker 1:

Uh, at some point during all of this, uh, a creator called josh strife hayes, josh strife hayes, strife hayes, he, he did a. Um, he did a video. I didn't watch the first one, but he did a second video to follow up, so he did a video. Um, spiffing brit made a video, kind of. Actually, let me set the stage there's been some confusion.

Speaker 4:

So I think what happened because I missed this, but he made a video that he actually deleted because he was going on about restricted mode. Spiffing brit made a video after that. He mentioned that josh had deleted his restricted mode video because he felt like he was wrong. And spiffing brit and josh strife hayes know each other. They've talked um now. Then josh releases a video where he is saying I don't know if he sees the spiffing brit one at this point or not, but he is saying, hey, this is the data I'm looking at and the reason this first one's important is because he this is when he asks other creators to share data with him and this one video farms a ton of data from, I think, 80 something creators that responded and then he makes his follow-up and I think that's what you're about to.

Speaker 1:

Yes, so one of the things that came out during this was remember that split earlier we were talking about, where the monetization kind of stayed the same but the the views went down. One of the other things that came from this is that desktop views went down and that became kind of the catalyst to what I believe the answer is, and I think Josh figured this out and yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 4:

We should explain, like on YouTube, in your analytics. These are there. They're in a couple different places One pretty easy to find, I think, in your audience tab, and another hidden in advanced mode. But there's a few different types of devices that youtube categorizes it. It goes tv, desktop or computer. We'll use those interchangeably because I think it used to be called desktop, but it just says computer now desktop, um tv, tablet and mobile. There might even be another I. I have a lot of tablet viewers on my channel. I don't think that that IQ has tablet viewers very much. Yeah, so I actually have tablet viewers represented. Maybe that's just a test that I'm in so they might add more devices in the future, but as of right now, I think those are like the big four device types that people watch YouTube on.

Speaker 1:

And this becomes important for strategies down the line, like if you, if you have a lot of television viewers, you want to make your stuff look like a television show and also, perhaps more importantly, it can be longer, because people's attention span on television is longer. Uh, okay anyway. So, all that being said, the interesting thing was is from the you know after the digging is that desktop viewers were down, and that was really interesting because, while it didn't exactly answer specifically why money was up, even though views were down, when you start to dig further into it, you actually realize there's a possible correlation between that and ad blockers. Now here's a section about what Josh said in regards to this. It's not the entire thing, but it is kind of the part where he starts to wrap it up, and I think it's really critical to listen to this very good stuff.

Speaker 5:

Because the reduction in views was from desktop, and yet we haven't seen a reduction in ad revenue. I think we can then make two points the lost views were not monetized views, because if they were, we would have seen a reduction in revenue, which we didn't. And computers both desktop and laptop are more likely to have third-party ad blockers installed than mobiles, tvs or tablets. But there's a third aspect to this. Youtube have claimed they have not changed how long-form views are recorded, and I think they are telling the truth. They haven't changed how they show the data they receive, which leads me to two possible conclusions Either a huge amount of computer viewers all decided on August 10th to collectively stop watching a huge amount of channels all at once, which I think is remarkably unlikely, or two, the data of the views wasn't being sent to youtube, because it either didn't happen or did happen and wasn't being sent I I love this because it is, of all the conversations that have happened regarding this, the thing that made the most sense.

Speaker 1:

um, something probably did change where youtube either, because you know in part of this too, he also talks about and shows, and anyone who's been paying attention knows that YouTube has been fighting ad blockers for a while, and I guess there was a date around this same time where computers that had ad blockers on them couldn't even access YouTube at all.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, it was AdMob Plus, I think. Yeah, like that date, there's a news story around this. There's also reddit posts that he shows he did a lot of research to get to this conclusion. It wasn't just, oh, desktop views. I'll make this assumption. He went in and, like, really found people at that same exact time saying why is youtube loading?

Speaker 1:

and, you know, turned out ad blocker and again, that makes sense because, from the the monetized view perspective, you're not losing money. Well, an ad blocker and again, that makes sense because, from the the monetized view perspective, you're not losing money Well, an ad blocker doesn't give you money anyway. So that is an actual scenario where whereby you know you would see less views, but your money would stay the same. Now, before this came out, I was thinking well, maybe they just changed the way they do counts, uh, and they're just not counting like a body of views, or you were talking about earlier, and that could also be the same thing. But this makes more sense because, if you think about it, the one thing youtube has done recently when it comes to views is inflate them with shorts. Uh, they count them differently now, as impressions rather than views. So they, that number, went up. It seems unlikely that they would change anything to make the views look downward. If anything, they're going to make them look more, not less. So this again checks another mark in the potential of this being the thing. And then, a day or so later, for me the final nail in the coffin, uh, renee ritchie, who is the youtube liaison, uh, on twitter, has shared this where he says viewers, you and again the question was um, from uh, lon sideman, who's uh uh, he's been around for a long time. He's a tech youtuber. Uh, how does a video with only 2,000 views, uh get 1600, 1100 likes, which is crazy? Uh, and this is one of the things we were talking about. We get a lot of likes for views and he goes and Rene quotes a help page and also links the help page.

Speaker 1:

Viewers using ad blockers and other content blocking tools, ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels with audiences with a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see fluctuations in traffic related to updates using these tools and bing. That's what made the most sense, because a lot of the people that I had seen complaining about this were tech channels and notoriously, viewers of tech channels have ad blockers. They're proud of it, how they've installed this ad blocker. I don't have to watch the block. I'm going to watch my and it's tech channels. A lot of the channels that were unaffected were these channels that you would think. Their viewership may not even know what an ad blocker is and their stuff wasn't affected. I think you said you knew some people that were similar to that.

Speaker 4:

So what I was saying earlier is the gaming channel I was talking about that they weren't noticing anything, and gaming channels oftentimes have a younger audience, and I think it was Moist Critical who was saying because he was covering the Josh Trepey's video, and in his video I agree with his opinion A lot of younger viewers don't really know what an ad blocker is or care to install one, and so you know, yes, there's probably some channels out there that feel like I don't know what everyone's going on about and they might have a younger audience or an audience that is not as tech savvy to have one of these installed.

Speaker 1:

And I think it's important to so. First of all, rene was a former tech YouTuber too. I've known Rene for many years. I knew him before he had this job. He's very specifically pointing this out and I guarantee you he's seen all these videos. Yeah, so again he to you. He's seen all these videos.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so again, he linked to the help page, but he pulled out that part about ad blockers and stuff, which is something that josh said in his video, not because he randomly chose one section out of that help page. He's saying without saying josh kind of got it right. This is confirmation without confirmation. And then later on in the thing he goes youtube hasn't made any changes to how long form views are counted, including desktop, which is further confirmation. Further pushes you into the fact that I believe also josh got it right, which I'm just gonna say kudos because, as he says, he doesn't even like making videos like that. It's not his normal thing, usually makes games, videos about games, yet figured out something would have been very difficult that even people who are really into this sort of thing didn't figure out like crazy.

Speaker 4:

I'm thoroughly impressed yeah, he's done some incredible work here. Uh, just shout to him he's. He's been on the channel before. I've talked to him in the context of, like, starting a gaming channel, things like that. He's volunteered his time, he's. He's really gracious and smart and, uh, this was really cool to see from him. I have one question. I don't think this is for Josh or anyone. I'm also not doubting his research or conclusions, but my one question about this whole thing is if it's true that ad blockers made the desktop version of YouTube not functional for so many people, why did that last so many days and I'm pretty sure it's still going on? Right, views the lower. Why is it that all of those folks gave up? Like, what happened to them? Yeah, like so many people stop watching youtube. Did they just get mad and go to twitch? They didn't pick up their phones ago. I guess I'll watch on phone today. Yeah, if you were going to youtube with the intent to watch something, you wouldn't just stop watching for weeks and weeks, right, like yeah, I think wild.

Speaker 1:

It's hard to know, like so. One thing is if, if they primarily watch on their computer, they might just think youtube's down, because one of the other things that that went up I think in this video we talked about was the searches for is youtube down, went up that same kind of right, and that was probably from all the people that had app lockers installed and it could be that they just watch something else. It could be they watch on a different device. It could be that those views would have been on the homepage and when they came in on another device, those videos that would have been promoted to them on their homepage were no longer being promoted to them on their other device Because, as you know, some promoted to them on their homepage were no longer being promoted to them on their other device. Because, as you know, some if you watch on your phone versus watch on your desktop, different videos sometimes are completely recommended to you depending on the device you're on. So if you're no longer on your desktop and you look on your phone, you may not get promoted an hour long video, because they know on your phone you never watch an hour long video, but on your desktop, you might, and on your TV you might, so it, tv you might so it.

Speaker 1:

I mean, some of the numbers were really large, so it's a lot of people to think like that. Many people have uh extensions installed, maybe, but again, it might have not just been plugins. It might have been that, along with maybe some of the bots, some of the other things we talked about. But I do believe, just based on all the information uh kind of gathered, but that is pretty much probably what happened. Now, yeah, as a creator, you're like well, now, what do I do?

Speaker 3:

nothing there's nothing you can do.

Speaker 1:

You can put this as a part of the trailer too. There's nothing you can do. It's over. It's over. No, it's not over. There's nothing you can do. There's nothing you need to worry about doing.

Speaker 4:

Make great content that's always the best advice. I think is because we we give so much advice and a lot of people don't want to follow it. They'd rather they'd rather not. So this is the one time we're giving you the advice to not do anything, right I? I have sorry, just being a little salty that's true I have like two conclusions or predictions I don't know you want to call them, yeah. The first is that I don't think this goes away overnight. I think this happens again uh soon.

Speaker 4:

In fact, I I think the the war between ad block and youtube is just starting and we are going to see more wacky things going on and, I think, going forward. It's safe for us to assume that when things look a little bit strange, you should probably go this direction with your first assumption, you know, and then do some research from there within your data, because that that is going to continue and it makes sense. Desktop is very easy to get adblock installed, mobile and stuff not so much, so makes a ton of sense. Um, that's, that is one thing, and there's another thing I can't remember what it was that's all right, I mean if it'll come back to.

Speaker 1:

I hate that. Same things happen to me when I get on a. I get on a train track of thought and then then I get derailed. It never comes back. I miss the train. So that was a good first one, though I liked the first half. Yeah, I think I'm pretty smart.

Speaker 4:

I wish I knew part two Also. It felt equally smart.

Speaker 1:

That's what this podcast is all about, baby. We give you part of it and then the rest we don't remember, and hopefully you'll come back to listen to another episode where we give you another half bit of information and then you come back the next episode after that.

Speaker 4:

Oh, I was gonna say, okay, that's the second one, the second one's for youtube. I believe that this is still a a burning hot fire that you're not putting out the right way. Why is adblock so popular? It is because YouTube is a platform. In my personal opinion not the opinions of vidIQ, just my personal opinion you've gone a little bit nuts with ads. Now I'm not even saying the amount of ads. I am saying that people have been pointing out for ages that there are dangerous ads that promote scams on this platform constantly, and I know the day that gets addressed, we're not going to hear about it in a news story. It's just going to quietly go away, and maybe it already has, and people aren't talking. I don't know. The last I heard is that's still very alive and well, is that ads promoting scams are still on this platform, and I want to see some work done there.

Speaker 4:

Youtube is doing a lot to prevent people from using ad blockers done there. Youtube is doing a lot to prevent people from using ad blockers, but I don't feel like they're doing enough to then give us back something in return if if I can't use an ad blocker, which I'm not, I'm, I'm on premium, very happy premium subscriber okay, but if I can't use one, right then what am I going to get in return? Scammed like I need, I need something in exchange. And another thing this is a total aside, but they have memberships for channels. If premium's a little too costly, make it so people can set up a membership for their channel where one of the perks is not seeing ads on that particular channel At least. Then you get money still and your favorite creators, like you, can choose which creators as the viewer you want to give that money to.

Speaker 4:

And you know, youtube gets a cut and then there's no ads on that particular channel for you, and I feel like that's a cut, and then there's no ads on that particular channel for you, and I feel like that's a very fair thing and I feel like that would be a really nice trade. When you do something that makes consumers kind of angry, you can buy back some goodwill by doing something in return. That's like we get. We did get rid of this thing and I know you're not gonna like that, but we give you this instead and we're not getting the this instead part, and I feel like situations like this are going to continue to bubble over and distract everyone from making awesome videos because, like, we're just so invested in that drama when YouTube could do a lot to just kind of get ahead of this. And this is just going to more from a personal place of frustration.

Speaker 1:

No, I get it, and with some of the things that were announced today which we'll talk about in a future episode, even weirder for like ads and stuff for live streams and whatnot. But we'll definitely get in that in the next episode. If you've been affected by these, download these down views, send us an email. The boost at vidIQcom If you're listening to the audio podcast, there's a link in the show notes where you can send us a text message. We want to hear has this affected you? What do you think about all of this? It's a lot to take in.

Speaker 1:

Hopefully we've kind of got you caught up. Maybe you didn't even know anything about this and we just caught you completely up. Or maybe you know bits and pieces of it but didn't know, kind of, the end result. I believe this is kind of the the end of this as far as, like what happened because of renee ritchie's tweet. If we didn't get that, I would say this is probably the the solution. But I think that tweet kind of uh kind of solves that, uh, that mystery. But I think also, dan's correct, this is just the beginning. We may see other weird stuff happening, uh, but that's what youtube is it's it's just a bunch of weird stuff happening all at the same time, all the time, anyway, all the time. We thank you so much for joining us. We will see y'all in the next one.