Submitted 6 months ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
A lot of Youtube channels are reporting declining viewership lately.
EX: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpVnx4_yqTo
Then I saw this article as well.
I haven’t watched YouTube much since they broke the search. And that’s far from the only thing they broke, it’s just what stopped making the site very worthwhile to me. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s significantly cut down or stopped using it.
Google is now expecting users to watch ads that are sometimes a full 25% of the viewing time, or slowing access and requiring logins when adblock is being used.
And even if you wade through all that, watching Youtube tech and info videos has become a lot like looking at online recipes. The majority of what you find is fluff and filler for only small amounts of useful content.
I used to go to Youtube daily for research and entertainment. Now I avoid the site completely whenever possible.
It seems we’ve finally reached an enshittification tipping point. It’s about time.
Because of short videos?
Some other analysis: jeffgeerling.com/…/youtube-views-are-down-dont-pa…
Nice actual data. Still concerning but I views seem to be down across the board. If you feel like it, you should share it with the rest of the community.
I dont know if anyone has noticed but…
Can we no longer watch youtube without being logged in? Every embedded video i see doesnt work. Every time i try to click on a video it tells me to sign in.
If i have an ad block running it basically blocks the website.
I really think its the auto plays and the untracked accounts.
Youtube would rather be able to track every user and make more profit per person than go big tent all audiences.
Youtube would rather be able to track every user and make more profit per person than go big tent all audiences.
True, but consider that Google, Alphabet, whatever, is fundamentally an information broker. All of their services and technologies are simply a means to that end. They have no incentive to go big tent if it means sacrificing their ability to harvest data on individuals and groups.
I haven’t been logged in for years, and I can still watch it. If they’re blocking, it’s an A/B test and not everywhere.
Microsoft edge. Or Brave. Or chrome on android. Regular pihole.
Every video i click on basically. If i use a front end like newpipe or duckplayer it works but no other way to watch any videos without logging in.
It’s hit or miss for me with my VPN, but between using an Invidious instance, Freetube, DDG video search, and cycling VPN locations, I’m never, ever logged in to YT.
And yes, Google/YT wants to track everything. Third party doctrine means that governments will pay them for this data rather than run their own surveillance systems. Anything that you’ve watched that can be used against you will be if it suits someone else.
Can’t confirm this. YouTube runs like always von my setup.
It’s not about Linus specifically. Many other channels (with actual good content) have been experiencing the same. Creators are assuming it has to do with restricted mode, but I’m not sure it’s convincing, it probably has more to do with algorithmic changes youtube has made.
The way restricted mode works is by effectively shadowbanning any content that isnt for kids
You wouldn’t notice it unless you go side by side on an account with restricted mode and look at the list of videos on a channel to directly compare what shows up on vs what is unavailable on the restricted account.
A creator like linus who exclusively makes content “for the algorithm” would know if it was just an update to the blackbox. He is also deliberately ignorant of politics and the world around him so it would be significantly LESS surprising if he didnt know about restricted mode or that it would affect his “non-political” content.
The political youtubers I’ve seen have made posts about entire playlists being unavailable on restricted accounts. Its actually a pretty big deal, honestly.
He generates far too much content without any depth, and it’s all infotainment.
It’s not particularly about him, his channel, or his content. If his channel had been declining, that’s usually a downward trend. What happened instead is that LTT lost 50% of their viewers suddenly in the last month. Other YouTubers have also stated that in the last month, out of nowhere, their viewership dropped crazily, up to 60%. However, LTT analyzed that although they have half as many viewers, ‘like ratio’ skyrocketed and ad revenue stayed the same. Josh Strife Hayes made a video blaming YT’s new feature “restricted mode” for this, which, when active, blocks a lot of videos for seemingly no reason. Some others have also noted the problem and are investigating, but a lot of information points out to something youtube did as the cause of the issue.
Can’t prove anything, but I have always had trust issues with Youtube’s numbets. Youtube is a for profit company with horrible owners at the top, and would they distort the numbers for political or financial reasons? I think they would.
I think Youtube and Reddit inflate and deflate vote counts and view counts when something is important to the owners.
Granted that is what I think. Can’t prove it. But Google, Alphabet, Youtube, and the new entrants like Grumble, they are black box for profit companies. Can they pass an independent audit for ther view and subscriber counts? We should not trust anything from these bad actors. Certainly don’t assume good faith. Audit them by five indepencent and transparent auditing companies to prove their numbers are legit. Every six months. Evert year. Forever. Until then I take all those view and subscriber numbers with a fistful of salt.
Linus from LTT was ostensibly really popular. I never watched it. Lets say their old numbers were legit. Is it possible some nephew of Youtube’s CEO is starting a competing channel and Youtube fudges the numbers to help push the nepo channel ahead? To me, yes, it is possible. I have very little trust for those black boxes. “Trust me bro” is all they got so far, and I have little reason to trust these entities.
And that’s what people watch. This didn’t change.
Yeah but they’ve been doing that for a long time. Other channels are meeting the market for in-depth tech content, and LTT is bigger than all of them.
What I’ve noticed is YouTube recommending me more obscure videos, from very small creators.
I very much appreciate whatever they’re doing, regardless of how these bigger channels are being hit by it. Yesterday I got recommended a video by an elderly woman, showing a mug warmer she bought. It was very sweet, had less than 30 views and it was a lovely contrast to the flashy, over edited videos stretching a paragraph to 10+ minutes.
Not saying the big channels are bad, I just personally like the small time channels and appreciate that YouTube has been (at least with the algorithm it has set for me) giving these small channels a shot at getting an audience.
I’ve connected with a lot of people from smaller channels, joined communities etc. yet this is much more difficult with the larger ones (in some I’ve been to, over the years, the chatrooms they set up are so huge the moderation sometimes just gives up or doesn’t even exist in any practical way).
Unfortunately, most of those so called “small channels” are actually bots using AI content farm.
YouTube should have a way to filter out certain content.
Like sub 1000 subscriber Chanel’s, 1000-10,000 channels, >10,000 etc
Sometimes you just don’t want to watch the big time YouTubers.
What we, as users, desere is transparency in the algorithm and significant input into how it works for us. Do you like big channels, small channels? etc. The problem is when people opt-out of sponsored content, but also refuse to pay. Transparency in the cost of delivery of service and the income from advertising would help there too, except if the service provider is wanting obscene profits.
I’m mixed on this. If the algorithm is known, big channels would just game it. They still will figure it out now and game, but it might take a bit longer. Just like these days most of timef the top 20 results with Google are completely useless nowadays because it’s either AI slop or pure marketing.
I only get these types of videos in shorts. In all the other stuff is like “we see you watched one video on this topic so here is 400 more”
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.
It’s not just him though it’s lots of channels reporting issues. So clearly no, it’s not as a result of the controversies, at least not exclusively.
That’s was months ago though, and the drop is recent. Why would people leave months after the controversies happened?
It’s also suddenly happening to most large YouTubers at the same time, so doesn’t seem related to any of them in particular.
This is what happens when people only read the headline and don’t actually watch the video. It’s quite clearly affecting all content creators.
Those stupid thumbnails pushed me away
Damn straight. I’ve actively starting avoiding videos with “stupid” thumbnails or click-bait titles in the last few months.
he’s a shill.
Has been for a very long time. I quit watching his video after I saw him post a thing that was going on and on about the superiority of the product in his left hand over the right, and how much faster it was and blah blah blah.
Both products were bandwidth limited by the PCI bus and there was no advantage to the expensive one he was hawking.
If you are unhappy because your views went from 2M to 1M the decline is in your mental health
It’s the capitalism brain that says: If you are not growing you are dying
I mean, the problem is not lack of growth, the problem is losing the stable sustainable base.
Because people wont stay 14 to 16 year olds for long
But then new 14 to 16 year olds are made
Personally I was only 14-16 for like 5 years at most
Maybe at some point we can all stop watching and hence supporting YouTube, that’d be nice.
Or if you use adblock and stream at 4k, google will lose money when you watch videos. Free content while fucking google over is a win win in my book.
It’s still a waste of energy, so if I were you I’d simply not watch the video.
well google is enshittifying themselves with AI and propaganda push, so it will be soon.
and it’s not just google. basically every major social media platform is enshittifying.
i hope that lots of people will realize that the dead internet theory is actually becoming true due to AI bots and move away from the internet in general.
We need less internet, more regional human connections. It would be better if the novelty of the internet wears off and is just seen as yet another advertising machine.
Users stop watching on Youtube to go watch on Tiktok. I can’t see that as a win.
Perhaps the lesser of the two evils, considering Google’s dominance. But yes, far from ideal.
I stopped watching LTT years ago. His channel is crap. He’s a tech personality who seems to barely understand technology, so most of his videos are just over the top bullshit. Not to mention his awful annoying vocal fry. He’s like the male Fran Drescher.
I agree with most of your points, but vocal fry?!
That’s such an asinine thing to care about.
I just find his voice very irritating. I know not everyone feels that way.
I also don’t hear any, and neither does Fran Drescher have one? I mean my ears were ringing too much from all the fapping to notice it on The Nanny.
Hes an emotionally stunted 13 year old, that thinks its funny to keep dropping/breaking things that most normal people could never afford to even touch, who is quick to criticize the wrongs of everyone else, but acts like a goddamn martyr as soon as you criticize him and his behavior.
his response to GamersNexus “being mean” by reporting facts backed up by receipts and evidence is only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s actually worse than that.
He does know some stuff about technology and his team knows the stuff that he maybe doesn’t know.
But in the fight with GamersNexus they basically admitted that they don’t have time to properly fact check stuff because they would make less money if they released less videos.
That’s from way back when. They shut production for a week, reassessed how they make things, and came back with the promise to be more thorough and not release a video when it’s just not done that day. And they have “missed” some days since.
I never watched that channel very much, but in the several videos I’ve seen (maybe 10-12 total?), he seemed to know exactly what he was talking about.
I’d be interested in hearing what specific complaints technical experts have with the channel.
its that Nasal voice right? like lois from family guy
Oh Linus is a giant child.
He once got pissed off, because they got called out by an actual scientist. They were creating videos promoting fake products. Then they played victim and pushed it instead of, ya know, taking the high road.
he rubbed me the wrong way when he created drama with employees like last year. people were being sexist towards a female employee how she wasnt in tech, and she should do anything on the "show.
His complete lack of self awareness and ability to own up and apologise when they’ve dropped the ball put me off the channel entirely.
That, and Emily was the best thing about the channel and she left so…
About Honey, they didn’t find out that Honey was scamming viewers until everyone else did.
What they found out earlier, at the same time as many other youtubers, was that Honey was “scamming” the youtubers themselves by replacing the youtubers reference codes.
At the time they thought the viewers still got discounts, so they didn’t announce anything about it since it would seem like they asked the viewers not to take the discounts so that LTT could make more money.
For example they found out one of their main sponsors Honey were scamming their viewers and essentially stealing from people, they just kept it quiet rather than owning it.
That’s one of the things I was referring to. GamersNexus did an expose on the Honey thing and filed a class action suit over it because they were essentially stealing money from creators. Linus was complicit and aware and said nothing.
Let’s also not forget the time Linus literally received a prototype cooler from Billet Labs for testing, was supposed to return it after review, and he not only reviewed it poorly (and used it for the wrong hardware), but then basically stole it and auctioned it off, later referring to this as “a small mistake.” Supposedly he only offered to pay for the prototype after this was also exposed by GN.
Dude’s just scummy. I’ve no idea why people will defend him to the ends of the earth.
I think the biggest channels I watch have under 4 million subscribers, and most of my channels have less than a million. I’ve never watched the big channels, so I don’t really care.
A while back, YT asked me about turning on my watch history, but I didn’t know it was off. I don’t know what that was about–I think they changed something–but my knee-jerk reaction is to NOT do what they want me to do, so I left it off. Now I just watch whatever is new from my subscriptions, and don’t have any suggestions cluttering my front page, which is a much better way to use YT, imo. So, thanks, YT.
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.
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.
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.
I stopped watching LTT videos when they just became long-form ads. Or when everyone five minutes was a sponsored segment.
This might be another example of over reliance on AI to judge what’s good or not to show users: news.clownfishtv.com/…/reddit-asks-did-youtube-br…
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.
youtu.be/hJ-rRXWhElI (a yt link, lol).
A brief summary from dailydot.com/…/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.
People are jumping the gun on Linus here, but it’s real the Second Wind crew do a great job and their recent videos, even the Fully Ramblomatic series are doing way worse.
Maybe if he did videos that were interesting again…not like my wife hates our tech at home videos or whatever
This guy seems really fake, I have only watched a couple and it too much personality for what I want. I just want to hit the topics and move through quickly, MKBHD and the boss guy are solid.
Other than thatnIbhave only ever heard of these guys when they have been acting like dicks internally and externally.
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.
Good.
The problem is those channels are very similar. I get tired of hearing the same thing again and again. There is really no need for weekly news
Fuck Linus.
3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 6 months ago
Had a discussion with another creator buddy and they said it appeared that there was a load less scraping going on which inflated their viewer figures for months. I wonder if youtube is finally stopping their whole content being scraped perpetually?