
YouTube views down for channels with more than 10M subscribers, analysis says - victorinax
http://kotaku.com/youtube-views-are-down-across-the-board-analysis-says-1790440740
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kristopolous
I've strongly believed for a while that a very large percentage of youtube
views are children, say under the age of 6.

I've observed children on tablets ... they will watch the same video north of
100 times ... it's what kids do.

Then you look at the successful youtubers; people who do things like unwrap
gifts or who make things I perplexingly am not entertained by. When I put it
in the context of "this is watched by 5 year olds" everything makes sense.

I was talking to someone at a company that tracks these things, she said "no,
it's actually women in their late 30s and 40s". This is even more evidence.
They are on their mothers devices. It's not like women in their 40s are
watching 60 variations of '5 little monkeys jumping on the bed'.

Multiple variations of this nursery rhyme have viewcounts over 100 million.
([https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=CAM%253D&q=monkeys+on+the...](https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=CAM%253D&q=monkeys+on+the+bed)).

I'm waiting for the commercials to be kids cereal and action figures, but
somehow that hasn't happened yet. I get a Capital One credit card ad, logged
out, in private mode, watching a nursery rhyme video. (hint hint, million
dollar business right there).

~~~
Andrenid
My 2 year old always makes her way from ABC Kids / Playschool videos to these
ones:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QG4n3-rKTs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QG4n3-rKTs)

They regularly have a half billion views, and are literally just someone
opening Kinder Surprise toys and playing with them.

I have no idea why she loves them, but she just stays captivated until we put
her back to Playschool.

For reference, she's never seen a Kinder Surprise in her life, or seen Frozen
(or any Disney movie), or anything that would explain her draw to these
videos.

As for the videos she does watch, at 1.5yrs old she already knew how to pick a
new Related Video, or drag the slider back to rewatch a video, and will
happily watch the same Playschool episode or Peppa Pig clip non stop for hours
if we let her.

This new generation who have never known anything other than internet
connected touch screens is truly fascinating to watch. Using tablets and
phones is as natural as walking or playing.

I am getting sick of cleaning the TV though, since we can't manage to teach
her that it's not touch screen!

~~~
vollmond
The comment section of that video definitely seems to confirm the hypothesis.

~~~
niij
Image of the comment section. That's fascinating, I never realized websites
like youtube were being used so extensively by younger generations. Really
makes me feel old and I'm college aged.

[https://i.imgur.com/ZSndTA3.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZSndTA3.png)

~~~
kristopolous
What's that Amber/Donna comment? Is this that famed iOS phrase autocomplete
thing acting up?

This looks like a toddler accidentally putting an SMS from an older sibling's
device in the comment box.

~~~
robgough
My guess is they've accidentally hit siri/dictation and it's picked up someone
speaking in the background.

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ChuckMcM
My first response to a statement like "youtube views are down across the
board" is that Google is being more effective at catching ad fraud. Just
recently we had the "$5M a day ad fraud story"
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219871))
on video ad fraud.

Ad fraud is prevalent because it is the perfect "victimless" crime. If you
build a system that defrauds advertisers the ad platform won't prosecute you
because they don't want to admit to the fraud, they will just figure out how
to detect and block you. They might try to take back money but there are lots
of ways to move money through the banking system so that you get to keep most
(if not all) of it. There are billions of dollars in play so stealing .01% is
profitable and essentially "noise" to the players. And everything is already
set up to automatically send money around so you never have to meet face to
face. As one person put it, "It's a giant money of river flowing right by your
doorstep, you're telling me you won't step out and dip your cup into it now
and then to pick up some walking around money?"

The effect of Google being more effective was they massively suppressed the ad
revenue from things like AdSense for content which both made legitimate small
scale sites no longer even making beer money, and the required infrastructure
to defraud AdSense a bit more expensive.

YouTube has been trying to get profitable for years, and they are trying to
get more advertisers on it, and it has a huge click/view fraud problem (as
evidenced by the Forbes article and elsewhere). So if they clean it of
viewbots then views will likely "go down across the board."

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epdtry
Title is misleading. Views are down for the 49 "YouTube personalities" with
>10 million subscribers. Views may well be increasing for other categories,
such as smaller channels or channels run by television studios.

~~~
otalp
Yeah, this changes everything about what the title seemed to imply.

I think it's a case of people becoming tired with the same stuff that's
churned out by those YouTube personalities with >10 mil subscribers. Once you
reach that level you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and once
you do that you're competing with a host of fresher channels with newer ideas.

~~~
andreasklinger
interesting theory

but i assume YT simply changed their recommendation algos

eg i see more random no-name channels now in my recommendations

~~~
elif
This did happen. Previously, "Recommended" was primarily your subscriptions
and you got notifications when someone you follow posted. Now recommendations
are mostly channels you are not subscribed to, and you need to "double
subscribe" by pushing the bell icon on the side of the subscription button to
get those notifications.

H3h3 did a pretty good summary:
[https://youtu.be/YMOLmbgAmsY](https://youtu.be/YMOLmbgAmsY)

Also this year they started quietly "demonetizing" videos that had bad
words/topics or were not advertiser friendly, so some YouTubers pivoted to
inane child content. I am pretty sure these demonetizing videos get
particularly burried by the Algo.

~~~
rasz_pl
No, you dont have to click any bells.

In order to watch videos from creators you subscribe to you need to ... view
your SUBSCRIPTION page. But people are mostly brainless sheep clicking
randomly on the shiny, and "subscribing" to them mean liking something double
plus good.

What all the 10m sub assholes are crying about is Google no longer pushing
their shit into peoples recommendations. Thats what Subscription is for, why
recommend something you already subscribed to?

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mikekchar
I just started making a few YouTube videos. I have very few viewers and I
haven't advertised at all. This lets me see how the numbers add up. For one
thing, it is obvious that they don't add up properly.

I live in Japan and after I upload a video I watch it once -- all the way
through, just to make sure there was nothing strange happening when it gets
re-encoded. I will go back to the video to respond to comments (err... one or
two comments).

My brother was in Saudi Arabia. He was nice enough to watch my videos. Once
each, all the way through. He never sent any comments.

Result: 39 views in Japan and 35 views in Saudi Arabia. I can say with almost
no uncertainty that these numbers are incorrect. I don't have any other
viewers in SE asia or middle eastern countries. Whatever is happening, these
are not normal views.

If YouTube are improving this situation, then that's good. But I have almost
no faith in their analytics.

Edit: Is Google reading??? Just checked again and now I have 27 views from
Japan and 4 from Saudi -- which is probably about right (if you consider that
every time I respond to a comment it counts as a "view").

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kalleboo
Everyone who's suggesting it's due to insert-pet-peeve-here (content fatigue,
quality, ads, facebook) is missing the fact that this happened pretty much
overnight. It's definitely a recommendation algorithm change (or as someone
suggested, clickfraud fixes).

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cnnsucks
Ads. YouTube is punctuating every video with ads every few minutes now. It
gets tiresome and drives people away.

~~~
SyneRyder
Ads, but also content / recommendations. I signed up for YouTube Red to
finally get rid of ads & support the few channels I subscribe to, but instead
it started promoting YouTube Originals that insult my intelligence. (I'm
really, really not interested in Scare PewDiePie, or Prank Academy, or
Foursome.)

YouTube keeps shoving recommendations on me that I'm just not interested in.
I'm more likely to start at Netflix first now (no ads, better quality), or
even Vimeo (which has tons of really good conference videos that aren't on
YouTube). I do miss watching TechMoan on YT, though.

~~~
jrockway
I also thought these were all pretty dumb, but clicked the X button and
haven't even thought about them in several months. I am kind of annoyed by
unrelated recommendations though; I watch a video where someone is making
tools for his lathe, then the recommendation is "MAN GETS STUNG BY BULLET ANT
OH GOD THE PAIN 30 MINUTES OF HIS HAND SWELLING UP AND THEN BEING RUSHED TO
THE HOSPITAL AND THEN HE DIES OR SOMETHING MAYBE NOT YOU CAN'T FLAG TITLES FOR
BEING MISLEADING SO HAH". Not interested, at all, seriously.

Some of my recommendations I blame on clicking on things that are popular on
Reddit. Pushes me back towards the lowest common denominator. (I'm not averse
to watching some car crashes.)

I'm not sure how refusing to watch Techmoan because of dismissable
recommendations accomplishes anything, though. Bookmark his channel, pick the
video you haven't seen, watch, close tab :)

~~~
SyneRyder
I wondered what you meant about dismissible recommendations and the X
button... then I realised that isn't an option in the YouTube smart TV app, at
least not that I can see. Much of my YouTube watching (especially while
subscribed to YouTube Red) was happening on my TV through the Smart TV
interface, not the web browser or phone apps.

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ygkevin
Good chance it's because facebook is driving away traffic from Youtube

~~~
jmnicolas
Or it could be Twitch.

~~~
dajohnson89
And/or better quality of music streaming services. I used to use YouTube
heavily for music. Now I use Spotify and Google play.

~~~
AznHisoka
I use VK which has almost every song i want to hear, even non-English songs.
no ads, no limitations.

~~~
ddorian43
But how do they $ if no ads?

------
automatwon
I significantly reduced watching Youtube after the Youtube channels I watched
started optimizing for revenue.

I gravitated to YouTube in the beginning because it felt disestablishment, and
less commercialized. Now, it is the establishment. I don't know much about
Youtube's payment / incentivization structure, but from the outside, I see
YouTubers valuing quantity / frequency over "quality" and things that are not
necessarily profit maximizing.

For example, there is one channel that originally produced funny skits. Now,
they just talk about "news" and current events. Each of their video nowadays
gets less views, but they're able to release more videos because it requires
less planning, filming, post-production. They claimed they were producing the
news videos as a stopgap to free up time to work on their feature film. 2-3
years later, they've made no progress. Their fanbase complained in the comment
section as this happened, and their videos suffered a higher amount of
dislikes than likes, in the beginning. Now, their news videos have bounced
back to a high high like-dislike ratio. I don't think it's because these news
videos inherently got better. I think they've successfully "pivoted" to this
content category, attracting the right audience while their original fanbase,
myself included, stopped caring enough to go dislike the video.

I see this trend with the majority of channels I watch, too. Here are some
examples of "fluff" content to gain views:

\- stretching out a simple topic into an unnecessarily long video

\- providing a "novel" / hipster / contrarian opinion on something already
well covered for the sake of being different

\- An unboxing channel that goes from unboxing things people want, to things
that are just ludicrous

\- Covering a topic subscribers wouldn't otherwise care about. Take my brother
for example, whose Youtube channel has 10 million+ views. His channel was
originally teaching people English, then he started making VLOGs about aspects
of American society such as going to the DMV or buying a used car, and
recently he made a video about Gingerbread houses. As someone who traverses
Wikipedia, I still think the audience interested in learning English have many
other things they find more entertaining than the history of Gingerbread.

\- "I'm quitting YouTube"

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gameofcode
Average views per channel (with >10m subs) might be down, but that doesn't
mean total viewing time on YouTube is down across the board. Views might be
spread out over different channels (This data only represented changes in 49).

------
kawera
Does anyone know if viewing times are down too?

