YouTube views down for channels with more than 10M subscribers, analysis says

I've observed children on tablets ... they will watch the same video north of 100 times ... it's what kids do.

Then you look at the successful youtubers; people who do things like unwrap gifts or who make things I perplexingly am not entertained by. When I put it in the context of "this is watched by 5 year olds" everything makes sense.

I was talking to someone at a company that tracks these things, she said "no, it's actually women in their late 30s and 40s". This is even more evidence. They are on their mothers devices. It's not like women in their 40s are watching 60 variations of '5 little monkeys jumping on the bed'.

Multiple variations of this nursery rhyme have viewcounts over 100 million. (https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=CAM%253D&q=monkeys+on+the...).

I'm waiting for the commercials to be kids cereal and action figures, but somehow that hasn't happened yet. I get a Capital One credit card ad, logged out, in private mode, watching a nursery rhyme video. (hint hint, million dollar business right there).

Ad fraud is prevalent because it is the perfect "victimless" crime. If you build a system that defrauds advertisers the ad platform won't prosecute you because they don't want to admit to the fraud, they will just figure out how to detect and block you. They might try to take back money but there are lots of ways to move money through the banking system so that you get to keep most (if not all) of it. There are billions of dollars in play so stealing .01% is profitable and essentially "noise" to the players. And everything is already set up to automatically send money around so you never have to meet face to face. As one person put it, "It's a giant money of river flowing right by your doorstep, you're telling me you won't step out and dip your cup into it now and then to pick up some walking around money?"

The effect of Google being more effective was they massively suppressed the ad revenue from things like AdSense for content which both made legitimate small scale sites no longer even making beer money, and the required infrastructure to defraud AdSense a bit more expensive.

YouTube has been trying to get profitable for years, and they are trying to get more advertisers on it, and it has a huge click/view fraud problem (as evidenced by the Forbes article and elsewhere). So if they clean it of viewbots then views will likely "go down across the board."

I live in Japan and after I upload a video I watch it once -- all the way through, just to make sure there was nothing strange happening when it gets re-encoded. I will go back to the video to respond to comments (err... one or two comments).

My brother was in Saudi Arabia. He was nice enough to watch my videos. Once each, all the way through. He never sent any comments.

Result: 39 views in Japan and 35 views in Saudi Arabia. I can say with almost no uncertainty that these numbers are incorrect. I don't have any other viewers in SE asia or middle eastern countries. Whatever is happening, these are not normal views.

If YouTube are improving this situation, then that's good. But I have almost no faith in their analytics.

Edit: Is Google reading??? Just checked again and now I have 27 views from Japan and 4 from Saudi -- which is probably about right (if you consider that every time I respond to a comment it counts as a "view").

I gravitated to YouTube in the beginning because it felt disestablishment, and less commercialized. Now, it is the establishment. I don't know much about Youtube's payment / incentivization structure, but from the outside, I see YouTubers valuing quantity / frequency over "quality" and things that are not necessarily profit maximizing.

For example, there is one channel that originally produced funny skits. Now, they just talk about "news" and current events. Each of their video nowadays gets less views, but they're able to release more videos because it requires less planning, filming, post-production. They claimed they were producing the news videos as a stopgap to free up time to work on their feature film. 2-3 years later, they've made no progress. Their fanbase complained in the comment section as this happened, and their videos suffered a higher amount of dislikes than likes, in the beginning. Now, their news videos have bounced back to a high high like-dislike ratio. I don't think it's because these news videos inherently got better. I think they've successfully "pivoted" to this content category, attracting the right audience while their original fanbase, myself included, stopped caring enough to go dislike the video.

I see this trend with the majority of channels I watch, too. Here are some examples of "fluff" content to gain views:

- stretching out a simple topic into an unnecessarily long video

- providing a "novel" / hipster / contrarian opinion on something already well covered for the sake of being different

- An unboxing channel that goes from unboxing things people want, to things that are just ludicrous

- Covering a topic subscribers wouldn't otherwise care about. Take my brother for example, whose Youtube channel has 10 million+ views. His channel was originally teaching people English, then he started making VLOGs about aspects of American society such as going to the DMV or buying a used car, and recently he made a video about Gingerbread houses. As someone who traverses Wikipedia, I still think the audience interested in learning English have many other things they find more entertaining than the history of Gingerbread.

- "I'm quitting YouTube"