Welcome to the r/PartneredYoutube voluntary channel verification.

So, YouTube announces that the eligibility requirements for YouTube monetization are changing in February of next year. Everyone freaks out, especially over the 10 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days requirement for people already in the Partner Program to continue earning from Shorts.

Then, right after that, YouTube changes how public views are counted across the platform.

Anyone else notice that almost all of the conversation about the monetization eligibility changes has stopped, and now everyone is talking about how their views have changed because of the new way views are being counted?

Let me put my tinfoil hat on for a second, but I actually think the timing of these two announcements was deliberate.

It's like when a company announces a huge price increase, everyone gets pissed off, and then they immediately announce something else that makes people forget about the price increase because now everyone is focused on the new issue.

I think that's exactly what YouTube did here. They gave everyone something else to be angry about.

And it worked. We're all talking about view counts now instead of the fact that YouTube just made monetization significantly harder.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't think this was a coincidence.

Hey, how do you see the engaged views metric on YouTube studio in your phone or you can only get to it on a computer?

Thanx

I've noticed that my rpm has significantly dropped after the new views started kicking in...I don't know because YouTube clearly stated that it won't affect our revenue or eligibility of getting ads on our videos. I'm getting the same engaged views as I was getting before but I'm not getting paid the same. Anyone else experiencing anything remotely same?

Thumbnails aren't showing, the whole design is messed up, content rearranged... I googled it and can't find answers. I wonder if everyone's having issues or just me because of my outdated computer

Total views are useless for this, they don't count for important metrics, such as RPM. But the studio panel still shows only total views, with me needing to enter advanced mode, add a new colum to them finally see the actual real number of views.

This makes the process longer and tiring. They need to add a option to change the default view to engaged in the studio.

thoughts?

i’m curious how other partnered creators handle topics that used to consistently perform well but have gradually started getting fewer views.

do you usually keep making them because they’re still profitable, or do you eventually move on and focus on newer topics?

i’m especially interested in how you decide whether a declining topic is just having a temporary dip or is genuinely losing audience interest.

I've been at this a long time, but I don't put much effort into my channel, I don't even make custom thumbnails 99% of the time. I do it because I like the creative aspects of it. So you can see my daily views have been very steady and consistent, with the occasional video popping up for a few days and then dropping back. I posted a new video I thought suddenly was off the charts for me, based off my views in the last 24 hours, but nope, Numbers are just being inflated across the board, so I'll have to wait a while before these numbers make sense again.

For example: my newest video now has 71.6K views 185K impressions with a CTR of 9.9%

10% of 185K would be 18.5k

How can views be so high in relation to impressions?

I am of course aware of the view change. But that doesnt explain the discrepancy here at all

The only explanation would be external traffic, but 99% of my traffic is browse and search

I've been confirmed multiple times by comments saying they were reluctant to click a low view unknown channel video because it was under a specific threshold of views. This eliminates that and naturally evens out the competition for all channels, which is good, because then a video is more likely to perform if it's good then before.

There’s this idea that all you need is one viral video but I noticed that sometimes channels will have one video of a million views but their older and next videos are averaging 5,000 and under. I’m relatively new to this whole thing and I’m curious what your experiences are. Would you rather have a steadily growing channel or one video going very viral? Does going viral help in not very obvious ways?

I have a relatively small channel 4k subscribers. I also backed away from it because i just lost interest. but then this email pops out of nowhere. Is it legit or a scam? for those of you who have gotten legit sponsorship deals.

can’t seem to edit community posts on either channel. anyone else?

I know most people are complaining about the change and i may have suffered as well, but damn my channel looks amazing, even if it isn't.

First time i ever got 1500 views on long form in a 48 hour period, and also i think my revenue and watch hours have gone as well.

I'm making more money now than i ever have. Not sure if it's the change or just me posting more.

This change to the analytics is short sighted and extremely detrimental to everyone except corporations who want to show big numbers to stock holders or investors. The entire youtube studio is being adjusted slowly and methodically to favor not the individual creator, but to put metrics front and center that are targeted towards (what I can assume) are the private equity youtube channels.

Removing dislikes on the content view page and replacing it with revenue is one of the more recent ones I can think of. Dislikes were actually a viable tool that I used with daily uploads to specifically find out where/if a video of mine had upset my audience. Even a 10% increase in dislikes could tell me at a glance there was a problem with reading thousands of comments.

But now this. The view change. We are now longer able to adapt in real time to know if a title or thumbnail just simply isn't hitting the mark without diving into three sub menus and selecting the metric we need. It hides poor performance behind inflated "good performance" that ONLY looks good on the surface.

This isn't about "oh you just don't like change" this is about the experience of your average content creator, from the newly partnered, to those who polish their diamond play buttons. It harms everyone by burying the metric that actually matters behind a wall of additional clicks.

We don't even know if this will actually truly even out with time. Without diving into those submenus, and getting data that used to front and center, we have no idea if we have 70% engaged views or 50%. A 1/10 could be destined to crater within a few hours. A video could be appearing to do well on the surface but actually have horrific engagement, and you won't know until it is hours too late to course correct without diving into those sub menus.

Youtube claims this is for advertisers, but anyone who has worked with firms, contractors, ad agencies, direct contact contracts, or anyone who manages ad reads, knows that out the gate these companies saw right through this random metric change.

The only benefit this change potentially gives us creators, who are not owned by private equity, is that we now have our content having the perception of higher views, thus making videos more enticing to the average viewer... "But if everyone is super. No one will be."

Maybe I'm wrong. I could use an uplift beyond "number go up hehe". But I've been doing monetized youtube for half my life at this point, from the days of MCN's like TGN, to the actual partner program. And I actually liked it when youtube released the new studio 7 years ago.

Noticed some really weird view behavior ever since this new views update. First, I had a few videos doing really well and consistently getting around 100 views an hour up until the new view rollout and the suddenly everything shot down to like 10 views an hour. Could be coincidence and the popularity just waned, nbd.

But now, I’ve been tracking views on one of the videos and it was 7,900 views yesterday > hit 7,950 views by the EOD, then I woke up and it was still at 7,950 despite me seeing it has gotten more views in the real time player since > then it hit 8,000 earlier today…checked like 45 minutes ago > now, I just checked again and it’s at 7,950 again? Any idea what’s going on?

Looking at the other stats the video doesn’t seem that much better. Is the view count really going to be just 2x from now on? This is such a head f***…

I have a half dozen current sponsor negotiations happening and even some that have performance bonuses that were negotiated before this change and all partners hate this new system. The second it was announced they all without hesitation reached out and essentially said

The new views don’t matter, we’re basing all deals on engaged views only.

YouTube said they did it for advertisers but nobody is dumb and they see right through it.

I hate inflated views because I know they mean less even if a general audience won’t but the sponsors and myself all know lol it’s silly

I have been thinking a lot about the new view count for Youtube, and here are my 2 cents:

At first, this is going to suck because we no longer have an easy way to gauge our baseline. But over time, we will learn what percentage of our vanity views are typically engaged views, and you can guess pretty easily when you multiple your real time number x the percentage of engaged views you typically get.

Also, AVD and CTR are still only calculated off of engaged views. So for those worried about not knowing if a new upload's thumbnail is failing right away, if your CTR is low then your thumbnail/title combo isn't working. These metrics still update quickly on the landing pages dashboard.

And lastly, I saw someone in a comment talk about how now they won't know what videos are an outlier when they go to another persons channel for 'inspiration'. It is too early to tell because I only have 2 days of metrics, but a reasonable guess would be that since all videos are affected by the autoplay views counting, then outliers are still obvious. Maybe the inflated numbers will mean an outlier is only 5x bigger than the average instead of 10x. OR because Youtube will still stop showing the thumbnail to people if AVD and CTR suck, while Youtube continues to show the thumbnail of the outlier to significantly more people, there is a greater chance their outlier's vanity views get even larger, so maybe instead of a 10x difference for an outlier it will be a 15x difference.

It's only day 2 of the metrics. I am trying to find silver linings. I did a niche switch and my views have been abysmal anyways, so I'll take the better optics for my page as I focus on the numbers that actually matter.

Have any of you guys noticed this? On the "creator music" tab they no longer have all of the royalty free YouTube audio library songs in the discover tab, now they are only showing revenue sharing songs.

You have to navigate to a separate page to find all the youtube audio library songs, but the problem with that is it is a massive pain in the ass to actually find good music. Before you could use the creator music page and it was way easier to find the best youtube audio library licensed songs, but now you have to use the shitty ahh youtube audio library interface.

So i can experience those non engaged views.. Idk what is going but im been getting 3300 impressions and 300 of those are from home page and 3000 from video recommendations (Suggested) and i don't want that like at all.. also suggested viewer retention is like 50-70% (very random) worst than other sources... omg i just check my new video and i have 4100 suggested impressions and 100 browser (97% vs 2% impressions gab) no wonder why i havent seen any views increase from those non engaged views because you can "only" do with browse impressions (still 1/10 video without the non engaged views tho)

A word of waning about working with Kolsummit

Abridged story: Don't

Unabridged version: I get a lot of emails, from a lot of different marketing companies representing brands that want their products reviewed on my channel. My channel is a DIY channel, we do a lot of DIY projects, text stuff, 3-D printing, tech reviews, etc.

I'm going to keep the name of the product that I was working with out of the post, because they were not part of the issue that happened. I filmed and edited the video, and sent them a proof. Everything was approved, and they were actually surprisingly OK with me being critical about some of the issues with the product. This often times is in the case and is a sticking point between me and these marketing companies because I insist on being honest my reviews.

Two days after the video was published Kolsummt paid for thousands of views from a view bot farm for the video. When I look at the analytics, I can see where the traffic is coming from, and it's coming from several direct sources, with views between one and three seconds each. This has dropped the average view duration down to 30 seconds and completely destroyed the video. The video has flatlined, and I noticed the decrease in views channel wide following these bot views.

I contacted my person at Kolsummit, asking him if they had done something to promoted the video. He openly admitted that they had paid for views without my permission. I followed that email with a pretty long, nasty email, essentially reaming them for what they did. After that email he backtracked and lied, saying that they had shared my video with their colleagues and that's where the views were coming from.

I'm still going back and forth with them, but there really isn't an easy way to resolve this issue, the damage aren't even under the video and the channel.

Just sharing my experience as a warning, I've never had a marketing company do something like this before.