this is definitely against their interests, unless they just plan on having people watch ads everytime they open a video, watch that video for like 1 second and go to next and watch more ads. There is no depth of depravity i wont put past corporation executives, so that feels very plausible how they think and how detached they are from humans.

It could even be prelude to some other even more horrible, like they start gatekeeping actually decent stuff with premium aggressively.

We should really start archiving the good content of youtube more, just in case… I would too, but i dont have that much extra harddrive space and i dont have energy enough to start learning to build a personal storage system that is secure and fault resistant.

I mostly watch videos from channels I’m already subscribed to, but recently a few shows I watch have dropped new seasons and I was looking for recaps on YouTube. It was nothing but AI slop channel after AI slop channel. I would click off as fast as possible to not give them the view, but I guess they will all count going forward. It really sucks because we can’t opt out of these channels and many of them don’t even admit to being AI anyway.

I have no idea how this change is good for them. I totally agree that it seems like it’ll encourage low quality content. After a few of those videos I can’t imagine most people sticking around for another, but what do I know. I’m sure they have more accurate stats than I do.

Didn’t see it in the article, but I wonder if on desktop at least will it count if you hover and “preview” the video before clicking on it? Hopefully not, then we can see if it is slop or not, though that will be 1 more annoying thing to do

I’m not super well versed, but my understanding was that watching the preview for more than X seconds already counted as a view. At least it was like that a while back after they were introduced.

Also be careful because these ai channels are sneaky and will use generic pictures or stills but the script and voice are all AI.

Dammit!!! At least they don’t get the ad revenue from me. Yeah, that asian guy with glasses hasn’t been in the thumb for a while now, but soon as I click on the vid, BOOM!, there he is

For those of us born before YouTube, we can just leave it.

For those born in the last couple decades, legacy tv and movies are difficult to watch and are only consumed occasionally. It will never, ever occur to YouTube’s primary audience to stop watching.

When a view counts as a view and as an ad impression were always separate things at youtube. Videos under 10 minutes can’t be monetised, I’m guessing they’re keeping that bit.

Videos under 10 minutes can’t be monetised, I’m guessing they’re keeping that bit.

Videos under 8 minutes can’t have mid-roll adverts, but a 2-3 minute video can be monetized and serve front and end roll adverts. Even a 30 second idiot video (IE Shorts) can be monetized but if it’s in the slack-jaw brainslop category (IE Shorts) you need a crap ton of views on it to make money.

About 2 months ago I did an experiment on my youtube page where I made a stupid 40 second video and then formatted it for regular format and idiot format. Regular format got 1400 views and made $5.86. The shorts video got 2293 views and made .54 cents.

Most of the shorts views were in the first 4 days and then the algorithm dumped the video. That’s one is done. It won’t been seen again. The long form format got most of it’s views in the first 10 days but it continues to get views every week.

I think it just means that the raw view count was never very important to YouTube. That’s why they will have “engaged views” and “qualified watch hours” etc.

What the other guy said.

The counter for advertisements are based on the number of views, hence counting a video as soon as its playing as a view, they’ll be able to jam in more advertising.