A lot of Youtube channels are reporting declining viewership lately.
EX1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpVnx4_yqTo
EX2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0tmhEtVJE
Fun times. Looks like a lot of channels are seeing a decline not just Linus. Hes just the latest to talk about it.
Then I saw this article as well and thought I would share.
Anyone here youtube creators? Are you seeing the same thing, a general downturn in viewership?
Everyone here is speculating about their content, but the simple answer is YouTube just changed how they count the view number. The change basically happened overnight, so it’s not some slow attrition of views. They said in the WAN Show that while the view count halved, the number of likes hasn’t changed (the view/like ratio doubled), and the revenue they earned hasn’t changed (CPM doubled). All of this points that the same number of humans are watching, but what counts as a view in the “views” number just changed.
How does that even work? If someone viewed the video then they viewed the video. Are they simply not counting people who basically clicked by accident or who only watched the first 30sec before deciding that they didn’t actually want to watch the video?
Even before this drop in views, the rule was you have to watch a video for at least 30 seconds before it counts as a view, as a way to combat clickbait where people instantly bounce from a video. Maybe they have changed this further? Or they change some kind of bot detection?
Probably doesn’t help that a bunch of the decent channels were bought by private equity and are now churning out boring, safe and uninteresting content.
https://youtu.be/hJ-rRXWhElI (a yt link, lol).
A brief summary from https://www.dailydot.com/news/youtube-channel-private-equity/
Some channels like Donut Media, Veritasium, and Task and Purpose have been acquired publicly. Others, such as Dude Perfect and Coco Melon, have been acquired more privately, with no public disclosure.
Plenty others. A key giveaway is when a channel diverges their risk. When the front man who is the reason you have watched the channel suddenly has co-hosts and large segments from other channels in their regular content.
Oh, so that is why Veritasium went to shit. That’s such a shame. It was a great channel that I was excited about when a new video would drop. Then low quality videos started coming out and I don’t watch them anymore. Haven’t unsubscribe yet though, maybe I should get around to that.
Ugh yeah and they had to interview the owner of Noah’s Arcade and he did an awful rap
I have definitely unsubscribed from some big channels that I used to watch routinely, and simply often don’t click on videos from channels I haven’t yet unsubscribed from. It’s just not interesting stuff. It’s filler crap. thankfully it seems like there are enough smaller channels to fill that space, including some of the people originally from those other ones (like speed and donut)
I’m sure declining viewers has nothing to do with the various controversies such as auctioning off prototypes, rushed reviews with misleading or false conclusions, mistreating staff etc. Channels like Gamers Nexus really laid into him.
I stopped watching LTT videos when they just became long-form ads. Or when everyone five minutes was a sponsored segment.
Google is making users/consumers not want to use/consume google things by making those things more difficult, more invasive, less user friendly to use/consume.
That’s it. That’s all.
If I just want to watch a clip that I could before but now I have to sign in because it thinks I’m a not, NO
If it wants me to watch ads for things I’ll never buy and actually forces me to, NO.
If it kills the front ends I prefer to use, or kills the ability to watch via proxy, for my privacy and/or security. NO.
If it feeds me Nazi shit without clicking a single link on a new install on a new browser with no profile on a new IP, fucking NO.
Because people wont stay 14 to 16 year olds for long
Folks here are missing the point blaming LTT for the drop. This has been a sudden drop, too sudden to be fatigue or audience tastes changing.
Also I can see the same on my own channel. About 2 weeks ago views suddenly dropped to a third of the usual views. And even high performing videos have had trouble getting views since. Even videos with a high impression percentage are getting lower than average views.
The same wsd also reported by Second Wind (old Zero Punctuation) and their experience is the same: way too sudden drop to be anything else except YouTube adjusting their algorithm.
Thanks for the analysis. I’ve got to say. We on Lemmy can be vicious.
Yeah, it’s easy to bark at influencer we don’t like.
I think his org has consistently done its best and I still tune in across the channels. I know that I couldn’t do better with matched resources, without experience and a lot more considerations.
Listening to everyone hate on a whole media group puzzles me a bit.
LTT has done bad things and never apologized. For example he copied a gamersnexus script and never acknowledged it.
And stole an item to auction off! I can’t believe people here defend their ass D:
What would make me really happy is if viewership across YouTube entirely was down because people were getting fed up with YouTube and shifting to alternatives.
The problem is that there aren’t any really viable alternatives. YouTube has three major advantages and all three are necessary. First and most critically it has a viable business model (that is it has a way to earn money to pay creators). It’s a shitty business model, but it is viable which already puts it ahead of most services that are coasting on VC funds and hoping they’ll trip over a business model before they go bankrupt. Second it has the infrastructure and capital to actually serve content. Running a video streaming service is the single largest bandwidth consumer you could possibly come up with and that means considerable network infrastructure costs, to say nothing of the storage demands. Third it has network effect going for it. Nobody is going to watch videos on your platform if there’s only a couple dozen of them total. The sheer size and scope of YouTube means no matter what you’re looking for you can find something to watch. It’s a one stop shop for AV content.
Every single competitor to YouTube has failed on one of those points, usually the first one, rarely the second. The last service I saw come close to hitting all three was Vimeo, but it flamed out not even a decade after it launched. Twitch.tv is struggling to make their accounting work and isn’t even a direct competitor because they’re pushing hard for live streams as opposed to pre-recorded videos. Alternatives like PeerTube have no business model and will never attract creators or a mainstream audience. Paid hosting platforms like Floatplane are replacements for traditional video streaming services like Amazon Video or Netflix not really platforms where just anybody can set up a channel and start posting videos.
To paraphrase a famous saying, YouTube is the worst public video streaming service except for every other one. Until someone comes along and figures out how to make enough money to reliably pay creators and has enough capital to actually serve that content reliably and in high quality YouTube isn’t going anywhere.
I wanna like Peertube as an alternative, but I can’t find any content I like there. And the app is so awkward to use.
I use Odysee and Peertube where possible but yeah they’re somewhat awkward, and the biggest thing I typically miss is the comments. As awful as most Youtube comments are, the critical mass is there, if you’re looking for a quick link to something in the video, the summary that the author should’ve included but didn’t, the correction where the author was wrong, or something else of actual value, chances are whatever it is you’re trying to find somewhere on the top heap of Youtube comments. As with most social media, the value is not in the service itself, it’s in the community. Steering that community towards somewhere where it will actually be appreciated is a herculean task when someone has to be the pioneers and live in that desert and put in the work to prepare it for the ones who will come after them.
As much as I do complain about Peertube, I do like how it’s like the old personal blog days. Just kinda quietly do your own thing. I’m actually thinking of starting a channel to teach Japanese. I’ll probably have a few lines of my diary and break down the vocabulary and grammar in English and French. It’s like shit nobody would give a crap about, but it’ll get me to keep up with my diary and maybe someone will find the info useful, which I think the earlier days of personal websites and blogs were like.
youtube is already replacing it with AI slop, and propaganda. they increased it.
Maybe at some point we can all stop watching and hence supporting YouTube, that’d be nice.
well google/YT is enshittifying themselves with AI and propaganda push, so it will be soon.
I’m watching less 'tube in general because youtube is obnoxious as fuck. They devote so many resources to getting you to watch ads, it actually causes the whole experience to suffer even with an adblock.
This might be another example of over reliance on AI to judge what’s good or not to show users: https://news.clownfishtv.com/p/reddit-asks-did-youtube-break-itself
Anyone here youtube creators? Are you seeing the same thing, a general downturn in viewership?
I have a channel with over 20k subs, nearly all evergreen content. Haven’t uploaded a video in many years, so it’s slowly getting fewer views. Fun fact, the pandemic saw the highest view counts, and I also didn’t add content back then.
Every enhancement YouTube brings is specifically to improve monetization, and since I disable ads on my channel and don’t have any sponsored content, I’m not getting any benefits. I also refuse to do shorts, so I’m losing a ton of exposure there, too.
If an active channel isn’t doing well, they should call it quits, TBH. They’ll either have to compromise the quality of their content “for the algorithm”, or their content isn’t actually useful outside of a single view.
isnt well know he had incident with a former employer over something like last year? the sub/fans are all just shilling/meming for him. isnt his shtick all just reaction videos on various tech items.
isnt well know he had incident with a former employer over something like last year?
It’s so well known that you can’t even name what it is?
Reasons I see:
a) the generation that grew up watching LTT is now at age where they don’t watch as much YT as they did before b) increasing amount of things happen which put viewers off c) consumer technology peaked and is now “boring” d) new generations don’t have as much interest in technology altogether
Let’s explain:
a + c) people watching LTT years ago were living in an exiting tech era where it boomed and you had mayor leaps in tech basically on a yearly basis. Moving from floppy disks to CD’s to USB sticks. CRT to LCD displays. 16-bit to 32-bit color. Solitare and Minesweeper to Call of Duty 4 and Need for Speed. Symbian and Blackberry to Android and iOS. Tons of manufacturers, tons of competition, tons of new and exctiting stuff.
Let’s observe the state today: iPhone looks the same for the past half decade. Android is basically just Google and Samsung. Storage is now all in cloud. New games are recycled and upscaled old games. Every new generation of hardware is same thing just 10% better/faster. New OS releases are just refinements without new features. Most changes are done just for the sake of change. Existing hardware can basically be enough for 5+ years. What is LTT realistically supposed to talk about that is interesting? There is simply no more interesting tech.
This ties in into d) - tech peaked, new generations “just use it as it is”, there is no need to tinker with it, prebuilt PC’s are more than fine for years to come. Since AI the IT job landscape seems to be in decline, both in demand and in pay. People do other stuff now that is more lucrative.
LTT is dependent on stuff happening so that they can make videos about it. But, stuff kinda just isn’t happening. Or the stuff that happens is just not noteworthy news anymore.
YouTube is hostile to viewers unless you pay them £20 a month.
It’s like 15 ads per 2 mins screen time with 2 being unstoppable and 1 being 3 minutes long. Slightly exaggerated but not far from the truth. It’s horrible. And they slow everything down too, the main video fake buffers whereas when you’re in premium it doesn’t.
I didn’t mind paying a fiver but had to do it via the moon to get it cheap but now they have stopped that.
Or you use adblock
I would but I primarily watch on my tv
get SmartTube Next if it’s an android TV
Sadly not. Apple TV
ah. i have the same issue on my iphone. I just don’t watch youtube on my iphone because fuck ads.
Get the ublock origin lite and on for safari, had worked an absolute treat for stopping YouTube ads on my iPad.
Another tip; Orion, the browser developed by Kagi can install proper Firefox extensions. You can have the real full uBlock Origin extension in the browser.
Edit: I believe it can handle Chromium extensions as well but who cares about those?
