[24262] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] The truth about the change in YouTube view counts
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Aug 18 10:26:53 2026
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2026 07:17:22 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
Message-ID: <20260818141722.GA3579@vortex.com>
Content-Disposition: inline
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed"
Errors-To: privacy-bounces+privacy-forum=mit.edu@vortex.com
The truth about the change in YouTube view counts
I've gotten questions about this so let me tell 'ya what I think is
really going on. YouTube announced that the public view counts
displayed on all videos will now increment if someone so much as views
a single subsecond frame of video, instead of the (never made public)
algorithm used to determine true viewers not extremely brief or
robot-triggered "touching" of a video that really shouldn't count as
genuine views. The implication is that this is to match the behavior
of other competing video platforms.
The upshot of this will be a big boost to many creators public view numbers,
encouraging the creation of ever more automated AI Slop.
But here's thing. This ONLY applies to those public view counts.
Google/YouTube says explicitly that this is to give creators inflated
numbers to impress potential sponsors. Now comes the fun part. Google
isn't going to use these "fake" inflated numbers internally for any
purposes related to monetization or YouTube privilege levels or the
like. All of that will still be based on what YouTube calls "Engaged
Views" -- which apparently will be using the same secret algorithm
as before. Creators will be able to see both numbers -- the inflated
public views, and the actually meaningful engaged views. But the
public cannot see the engaged views.
In other words boys and girls, it's essentially a fake. There's no
other way to put it. And a rather cruel one too, because many creators
won't realize what's going on right away, and will see the inflated public
view numbers and get excited, when in reality it's all just YouTube
playing with the numbers to count "views" that really aren't views at all.
Another nail in the coffin of "Don't Be Evil".
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
_______________________________________________
privacy mailing list
https://lists.vortex.com/mailman/listinfo/privacy
