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!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m8DZft_zLH4&t=1s

all 47 comments

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[–] 130 points 1 year ago (8 children)

The adblocking will continue until transparency of content delivery improves.

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  • [–] 56 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 55 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Banksy’s Letter on Advertising presents it in better words than I ever could.

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  • [–] 73 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    So they go and blame ad blockers for the decrease at the same time they cause said "decline"? Classic.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago

    Get ready for “login, like and subscribe guys” and dont forget to smash that login button

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    All I can say is my feed has been shit since it happened.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    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

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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. 🥲

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I've literally never had to do that? And with uBlock Origin I don't see ads at all.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    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 ...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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").

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  • [+] -10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Views always go down in summer. This is a regular trend. Less people watching YouTube, more people going out and doing stuff.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    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).

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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"

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I'm very skeptical of that argument.

    1. Millions of people didn't throw out their desktops overnight.
    2. 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.

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