posted in Technology
YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing
techcrunch.com/2026/08/17/youtube-will-now-count-a-view-as-soon-as-a-video-starts-playing/
Right after they announced they’re doubling the required watch time to turn on monetisation, it’s clear what they want - more volume, less quality. Slop, slop, slop.
100%
These changes will cause smaller creators to take more shortcuts, which will mean more use of AI, even if they’re not using it to generate the video itself.
As a creator myself, I don’t know what purpose this metric really serves in the end. I guess a one-second view tells me if a thumbnail image was effective, but apart from that, it’s just useless.
I’m hoping this actually leads to less AI slop.
I’ve clicked off of so many videos after a second or two once I realized they were just AI narrated garbage.
Same, but I don’t think it will. Luckily YT is demonetizing AI slop channels, so people running those at least have to do more legwork now in order to make it worth it. Overall, it’s good that all indicators suggest YT is recognizing AI slop as a problem for their platform.
I made a video about training your personal version of the algo to suggest less of it, in fact, but since you can’t outright turn it off, there’s no magic bullet.
I now use the right click “open in new tab” on any video so if it is AI, I can close the tab then hit the list where the video was and then go to the action dots to the right of it and “do not recommend” the channel. Have managed to give most of the godawful HFY videos the slip (…though recently new AI channels have popped up in my feed… Urgh…)
Fun fact, that’s one of my suggestions in my AI Slop avoidance video; That said, the new meta seems to be Right Click > Not Interested > Tell Us Why > I Don’t Like The Video.