YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing

Well that's a great incentive for clickbait content - cause now it won't matter if you can keep people watching after you've reeled them in.

You'd think this would be against YouTube's own best interest, considering they want to keep you watching, and people don't often like watching that kind of clickbait-farm slop...

Or maybe I and the people I know are in the minority, and a lot of people just watch it whether they like it or not, which would be disappointing to hear.

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.