Likes from logged in views do count, the like to view ratio is higher due to that.
A German YouTuber tested it with an unlisted video, I can’t find it as of now but I do find a lot of deleted videos in my liked ones…
Basic theory as of the time of the video is that they want to go against bot views. Short views did not decline, only long form video, and of those the people with mostly desktop views are hit the most.
Edit: found it!
So do advertisers still have to pay for impressions or clicks if the viewer isn’t logged in?
Something tells me Google’s just going to pocket the difference now.
From different youtubers self reporting they say the amount of money they make hasn’t changed, so it appears they still play the ads but not count their views on YT
Get ready for “login, like and subscribe guys” and dont forget to smash that login button
I don’t understand how anyone used YouTube anymore. I’m not going to spend 5 minutes solving a captcha every time I want to watch a 2 minute video.
I’ve literally never had to do that? And with uBlock Origin I don’t see ads at all.
adblocker
I’ve literally never seen a captcha on YouTube
Edit: Also, I generally watch 30+ minute YouTube videos from people I’m specifically subscribed to
That’s because you’re logged into an account. And they track and make money from you
It’s not about being logged out. Something about your browser configuration is messed up, or your ip address is blacklisted, giving you frequent captchas.
On a clean browser and IPV4 you get zero captchas without being logged in
No, something about your setup is messed up. Likely they can fingerprint and identity you.
If yeoue IP address were shared by many users and you had a properly configured browser to defeat fingerprinting, then they torture you with captchas to force you to login, so they can profit off of you
I use FreeTube frequently as well
I pay for it, because I’ve always watched a lot of it and I got used to “YouTube Premium” when it was called “YouTube Red” and came free with “Google Music” (now called “YouTube Music”).
just heads up if you’re getting captchas on YT you’ll probably start getting those on other Google services over time too.
it snowballs like this: YouTube decides you’re a bot => you use less YouTube => Google/Alphabet gets less information/fingerprints of you => Google Search decides you’re a bot => you switch to a different search engine => Google Maps decides you’re a robot …
The experience on iOS using Safari+AdGuard+BakingSoda+Vinegar or simply the Orion browser is flawless. No ads, play videos with locked screen.
The adblocking will continue until transparency of content delivery improves.
MFs in my IT group at work took away our adblockers. Now I can’t look at ANYTHING off the corporate teet without my machine dying due to the sheer volume of ads on the average website
I believe that was their intention, then.
Ads are pretty evil anyway.
They’re legal harrassment
Banksy’s Letter on Advertising presents it in better words than I ever could.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Banksy
Goddamn, this is unfathomably based, thank you for sharing.
The adblocking will continue
until transparency of content delivery improves.
So they go and blame ad blockers for the decrease at the same time they cause said “decline”? Classic.
Just like saying the open web is broken when they’re the ones who broke it.
I knew something was odd. I watch youtube without an account and in the past few days, when trying to watch some of my favorite channels youtube prompted me to “lognin to prove” I’m not a bot. This was only for a handful of channels, others seem to work fine.
So far I’ve seen RedLetterMedia blame Restricted mode. Then saw SpiffingBrit refute that. Some comments I saw blamed ad blockers.
Then I checked out, not my problem. It’s a black box everyone is trying to solve.
Restricted mode is only turned on if that account does only watch restricted videos.
Wasn’t it already proven to be an ad-blocker update? I though thet blocked the url that counts the views. So no views are counted
I did some youtubing last week and saw three people claiming that three different theories were already proven.
I find it crazy that the client would call an API endpoint to register a view. Then we could just call that end point in a script to arbitrarily inflate the view count, can we not? How do they prevent this exploit? Wouldn’t it be better if the server registered the view after a certain amount of the video was delivered?
Why is that crazy?
You don’t want to register a view just because the backend sent a 200 response for the video.
You want to register a view when the video has loaded, it has begun to play, and quite likely after some arbitrary percentage of the video.
This is all front end information. How much of the video was made available to the front end to play isn’t really relevant.
Alright, not “crazy”, but this doesn’t explain how they combat exploiting this by just calling the end point.
That’s more or less how it works, but that’s still an additional call. If Google is not tying it directly into segment download requests, then it could potentially be blocked without disrupting playback.
I have no insight into the details of the inner workings. If I download a video with yt-dlp, does it increase the view count? If not, then it’s a broken system, yeah?
If I download a video with yt-dlp, does it increase the view count? If not, then it’s a broken system, yeah?
I’m very curious to know how they register a view, yeah. The only true measurement is the video reaching someone’s retina or ears, to measure attention, which is impossible at a large scale as of yet. 🥲
They’ve been using AI to detect things like that for a long time. (AI in general not LLMs as far as I know.
A German YouTuber tested it with an unlisted video, I can’t find it as of now but I do find a lot of deleted videos in my liked ones…
How exactly? Because if it was just watching the video and looking at the view count shown under the video as others making this claim have done: That thing isnt updated in real time and also fuzzes the real number making this way of testing misleading.
I am not sure about the AdSense metrics page, tho.
I’ve heard before that you need to wait 24h before checking the view count again. Although, yeah, I believe you can get more up-to-date counts as the uploader.
All I can say is my feed has been shit since it happened.
I saw Josh Strife Hayes talking about this and I think he was collecting some data to potentially do a video on it? Will be interesting to see the results and if they match up with this.
Yes! The one I mentioned quoted Josh and went further with his research
deleted by creator
Views always go down in summer. This is a regular trend. Less people watching YouTube, more people going out and doing stuff.
I’ve heard about this from a number of youtubers. It seems to be a much bigger dip than they’ve ever seen
It’s not related. A bunch of different content creators across a bajillion different genres have publicly shared that it’s one specific type of view (desktop views) affected in their analytics (no other view type shows any statistical difference), and it’s acting the same way for everyone.
It’s just not that total views are down… it’s evidence that YouTube has changed the way they are counting the views of PC viewers. Why, or exactly how, no one is sure of yet (pretty sure YouTube has been silent on it and the reasons that it is happening are all speculation).
Yeah and first it was most of the views were definitely going down because of restricted mode despite that it was a feature used by a like a fraction of a percent of users and was over a decade old. None of the specific information getting parroted around has actually made any sense. Less people watching on desktop can also track with less people actually owning desktops or using them to watch YouTube, couple that with the fact they just got a drop of viewership and now they cant accept the common demonanator being that their videos are just getting less views
Less people watching on desktop can also track with less people actually owning desktops or using them to watch YouTube
Not what’s happening. The change can be pinpointed to an exact specific date for everyone. It’s just statistically impossible to explain that away as “fewer people are watching”
I’m very skeptical of that argument.
- Millions of people didn’t throw out their desktops overnight.
- Lots of tech channels finding their core audience that’s actively supporting and often growing on platforms like patreon aren’t showing up in their metrics while fluff videos are getting picked up outside their community on mobile and "performing well“.
So something definitely seems to be going on.
To me, ads contributing to "views“ metrics seems the most logical since YT wants to incentivise ad watching but I have to agree it feels like every day someone has proven a new theory so it’s hard to say what exactly is going on.
