YouTube views are down (don't panic)
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
I am genuinely watching less YouTube because it's showing me less things I actually want to watch.
The “subscription” tab is the best way though.
They may weasel you into activating it via some other route that states in the fine print that they need to activate your watch history to provide [random almost unrelated feature].
Yeah, that's my bad. I can't handle being alone with my thoughts so I need constant background noise.
Sometimes. Not always. It depends on the video and my mood.
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.
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.
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.
The subscriptions page also does this.
That's not really the point of recommendations though. You don't know whether you want things you don't yet know about, and that's what recommendations solve for.
Why would you want an algorithm to feed what you should watch, like if you were soullessly ‘consuming’ video ? This is saddening.
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.
Whatever YouTube did in the last two months needs to be rolled back.
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.
All of the services with news feeds inevitably change from timelines sorted newest to oldest, to engagement algorithms full of random garbage.
Now you get every video without even having to open youtube.com
* 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.
I'd switch to grayjay, but I like a lot of the other revanced features, like automatically skipping over "like and subscribe" reminders.
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.)
For example, after searching on my phone, some of the videos in the search results would play silently without me selecting the video. Then, the video would show up in my history.
I also wonder if they aren't counting short (under 10 seconds) views of longer videos?
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.
Whenever I see my (9-year-old) nephew watching YouTube on their TV at home, I get a little horrified at some of the ads he's exposed to. But this has been normalized throughout his childhood, so it seems unremarkable to him, and his parents seem to be desensitized to it as well. I suppose some of this is bias on my part: I aggressively avoid exposing myself to advertising, using in-browser ad blocking, network-level ad-blocking, and OS-level DNS VPN-based ad-blocking on my phone. Whenever offered, I always pay for the service tier (like YouTube Premium) that removes ads. I get that this could get expensive real fast for a lot of people, and isn't feasible. (But I know a lot of people who don't even install browser ad-blockers, which is just baffling to me.)
But that's the big problem... people are being forced to choose between an uncomfortable level of financial expense, and paying for things with their attention, where that attention is being exploited with deeper and deeper psychological manipulation that has been fine-tuned over the span of decades. On the occasion I do see an ad (especially a video ad), my reaction to it is so viscerally negative that I mute audio and look away, even sometimes shutting it down entirely.
$14/mo is a lot just for brainrot so you can listen to your kid shout "skibidi Ohio sigma rizz" all the time
> $14/mo is a lot just for brainrot so you can listen to your kid shout "skibidi Ohio sigma rizz" all the time
They'll get that from school, most of them aren't watching a YouTube vid and inventing culture, they're just picking it up. Like every other generation
This just demonstrates how much money is in those ads and how much Youtube needs to charge to compensate for that. And advertisers wouldn't pay that much if it wasn't at least somewhat worth it, i.e., the psychological manupulation is worth at least that much w.r.t. their bottom line. The average person therefore "pays" with $14 worth of brainwashing.
You could obviously argue that $14 is just a ripoff and they don't make that much money off you. Sure you are not average and perhaps less influenced than others, but fun fact, a large majority of people believe that about themselves.
By the way, Youtube Premium still collects your data and uses it. Without that, it would need to be even more expensive.
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.
Um what? How much they get is based on views and subscriptions, not on whether an ad was filtered or not. It also doesn't depend on whether you click skip or not.
They have a plethora of ways to make the app and website suck for non-paying users now, including and not limited to:
* faking an interruption when starting to play
* random errors mid-play
* no longer playing on hover on-web or in-app
I've just taken that as a good signal I should read more books instead, but I imagine it kills view-counts
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
When the ad starts, just refresh the page. It will act as though it's already played the ads, even if it is an unskippable ad.
I click a video by accident. It begins to play the ad before the video. I have to watch the add before I can go back to looking for what I wanted to watch. eugh
I continue to find it amazing just How Big the impact of "advertising" is in the brain of a median HN commenter vs. the attention paid (almost none) to it by citizens at large.
Like, that Liberty Mutual Duck is just weird to most folks, but to us it's somehow the greatest assault on our freedom imaginable?
Maybe the humor was bad. But the point stands: advertising has been with us since the dawn of "media" and no one cares outside our oddball bubble. People sat through ads on their sitcoms in the 70's and they sit through the annoying insurance birds, and... who cares?
It's only here that people somehow believe that contra all evidence, somehow advertising on the internet is a unique affront to all that is holy. When... it's just ads!
Far beyond the time wasted, they're an invasion of privacy.
I’m also annoyed because this is a bit of a rug pull by youtube. The videos I watch of some obscure mechanical repair on a motor uploaded 15 years ago aren’t being monetized and they do not cost youtube enough to justify the multiple ads at the start and another in the middle that I have to sit through now to see it.
Youtube is going through major enshitification and is destroying the experience of consuming the largest video library in the world.
We nerds have been on our anti-internet-advertising kick for like 20 years now at least. I think the ship has sailed for that particular analysis.
This is not a safe assumption. Personally, I've stopped using YouTube entirely for entertainment; the level of annoyance dealing with it vs the value I get out of it is just not worth it any more. I'm doing other things with my time now instead of watching YouTube. Some of that is watching video on other platforms, and some of that is spending time on other hobbies instead.
Not sure if I'm typical (probably not!) but I never disable the ad blocker; if a video or site doesn't work with an ad blocker, I just move on.
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?
I do genuinely want to watch YouTube videos, but I don't want to have to deal with anti-adblock measures ruining the experience. So I pay. Which is reasonable, no? Either I pay with cash or by allowing myself to be manipulated into buying things I don't want or need. If those are the choices, I choose not to pay with my attention.
People's income levels change.
Training them that your product is utter and complete garbage, means those people won't ever become customers. Ever.
The truth of the matter is, that just like their search, every other aspect of Google's infra is in a state of decay. Youtube is slow and takes forever to start now. Google search is pathetic, takes forever to give results in some circumstances, and randomly locks people out with captchas.
The Google of today must be complete chaos internally, it's the only explanation I can see. If the problem is AI, you never give up a cash cow whilst you pivot. You don't let what you have fall to tatters, whilst you pursue some other goal.
Especially when Google has the scope and capability to maintain and yet also pursue other avenues.
I suspect, but could be entirely wrong here, that Google has pulled key people, drivers, movers, which are a rare breed -- out of key positions in all of their structure and focused them on something else.
But anyhow.
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.
> On the creator dashboard it ranks views on your latest video against your last 10 videos. So when someone complains their video is 10/10, it's means that it's their worst performing recent video. 1/10 is what you aim for.
All the available evidence seems to suggest that this is an accounting change, rather than a change in viewer behavior.
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.
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.
A lot more recommendations for videos with <100 views
One long (>20s) unskippable ad followed by another with skip button but fewer intermittent videos throughout the rest of the video
For long videos they will now roll an ad if you skip forward significantly
So they are clearly doing two things:
Pumping ads up for popular videos
Randomly sampling new videos to put in the feed
It’s an interesting exploit + explore strategy and it seems like everyone hates it
You can see if restricted mode is turned on for you. Once on youtube.com, click your profile photo, and in the menu the pops down, look and see if "Restricted Mode:" is set to "On" or, "Off". Some people have found that by default it's been put to "On", even though they have not set it.
If you're not logged in, Restricted Mode is calculated by a bizarre set of rules like your not-logged-in watching history that Google totally doesn't keep track off (ie: you watch a lot of Blues Clues, you're probably a child).
- Some channels being affected more than others
- Likes remaining stable
- Revenue remaining stable
Could be explained by Youtube only counting non-adblocked views.
Perhaps an attempt to align Youtube's goals with creators' goals. If we don't get revenue then you don't either.
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.
Saved enough money to finally quit the job you hate? Think again.
Starting sometime within the past month or so, they changed the interface so that instead of having many rows of suggestions, now it only has a single row, making it more work for me to find something I want to watch. As a result I watch it much less now.
Prior to this change, I was considering paying for it to skip the ads. You could argue that since I've already given them lots of info about myself (I'm watching it over GFiber after all) I may as well just sign in, but this level of intentional enshittification really rubs me the wrong way.
• YT right now can't compete with direct creator sponsorships, which is a huge potential revenue source they want to tap.
• This also makes YT Premium less appealing since there are still ads, though these are "skippable" in a sense.
Does anyone remember the internet before pop-up blockers? Like, right before. It felt like the same thing to me. The internet was infested with pop-ups and becoming borderline unusable, and then comes along the pop-up blocker (and other things, but I'm simplifying here) and there was a "golden age" which is now giving way to a new wave of advertising-based atrophy. Not sure what happens next.
You said it:
> it's only going to get "worse"
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.
That golden age was short lived because all our favorite websites were unprofitable and shutdown.
Painfully true.
Obligatory "YouTube is Broken" Video
I mean, I haven't been clicking as much on video on search result pages because now they are either buried after AI summaries, or my search workflow starts off in a chat prompt somewhere where YT results are not even a thing most of the time.
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.