September 25, 2025 • 39 mins
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YouTube creators experienced a mysterious drop in views around mid-August while their ad revenue remained surprisingly stable. The culprit was YouTube's battle with ad blockers causing desktop views to disappear from analytics while leaving monetization unaffected.
• Desktop viewers using ad blockers suddenly stopped being counted in view metrics
• Views dropped approximately 30% for many creators, particularly those with tech-savvy audiences
• Despite lower view counts, ad revenue remained stable since ad-blocked views never generated revenue anyway
• Engagement metrics like likes-per-view increased, suggesting core engaged audience remained
• Josh Strife Hayes collected data from 80+ channels to identify the desktop viewer correlation
• YouTube liaison Rene Ritchie confirmed ad blockers were affecting view count accuracy
• Tech channels were hit hardest while gaming channels with younger audiences saw minimal impact
• This appears to be just the beginning of YouTube's ongoing battle with ad blocking technology
• Creators don't need to change their content strategy as this is a platform-level analytics issue
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So it wasn't restricted mode, it wasn't AI,
it wasn't any of those things.
We're going to tell you exactlywhat the problem was right now.
Welcome back to the onlypodcast that comes to you when
something breaking happens.
Because it's broken, get it.
What a pun that was.
I'm Travis and I'm here with Dan.
Hey, you're good at puns, I'mpunny, but today's subject is
(00:23):
not punny.
It is about how we're allcanceled.
It's over for us.
Youtube has crashed.
It's dead.
We're done.
This is our last video.
It's been nice.
Thanks everybody for usingyoutube.
It's over.
It's been over.
Yeah, that no one's gettingviews anymore.
It's terrible.
It's a terrible time on youtube, not really so.
There's a lot going on.
There's a lot of um.
There's some truth to some ofthe things you may have heard
(00:44):
recently, which is you's a lotgoing on.
There's a lot of um.
There's some truth to some ofthe things you may have heard
recently, which is you know, alot of big youtubers are talking
about how their views are down,and smaller youtubers as well,
every every youtuber.
There's a lot of differentyoutubers, and then there's some
that are like no, nothing'snothing's changed.
Probably reasons for this.
We're going to get into some ofthose reasons today.
Today's uh video is all aboutviews on youtube, which is what
you all care about.
But something's been going onlately and, for those of you who
(01:05):
have not been paying attention,a couple of larger creators
have recently stated that sinceabout mid-August of this year,
views have been declining fortheir channels, and this happens
from time to time on YouTubefor a variety of reasons.
The ones that are normal areseasonal, in other words,
certain times of the year youcan bet on views being terrible,
(01:28):
january being one of those.
Beginning of summertime, a lotof time is the other, and then
going back to school aroundSeptember actually, ironically,
around this time would be athird.
But this is different.
There's different markers inthis that are kind of showing
that something different isgoing on.
Dan, when did you first hearabout this latest controversy
(01:50):
about views going down and whatdo you remember?
Because, again, this was acouple of weeks ago when it kind
of started, but we're startingto see the videos now.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Yeah, I think right around when Linus uploaded their
podcast clip about it.
Someone sent it to me and Iwatched it, and you know it's
hard to know in the moment ifyou're looking at a channel that
is complaining about views ontheir end and they have a lot
(02:18):
the stakes are high over there.
They have a bunch of employeesand people who work on that
channel.
The channel is the lifeblood ofthe whole operation, and so if
it's going down, they have to beconcerned, and this points to
an issue that I believe themthat they were having this issue
, but I didn't quite see it yetas like a widespread sort of
thing.
I think it was the catalyst,though, but maybe someone else
(02:38):
was already tapping into this.
They just weren't as big.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
So I'm going to show a real quick clip of that
particular podcast episodeyou're talking about and I
definitely recommend watching ifyou have not already seen it,
or at least parts of it anyway,because as a YouTuber, it's
interesting stuff when heexplains, ultimately after
saying like the views are downand we're seeing some weird
things, and again, this was kindof early on, so he didn't
really have a lot of information.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Some of his conclusions I thought it's
pretty interesting.
Here we go.
So it's it's a little confusingright now, but you know, it's
one of those things whereyoutube always tells us you know
, uh, when, wherever you wouldsay algorithm, you have to say
audience, where you're trying tosort of diagnose, you know what
you need to do to help thechannel performance.
(03:28):
And so we've got to askourselves okay, well, what is it
about?
Whether it's our packaging orwhether it's our content that is
not delighting our audience?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Now this is 99% of the case when you see views
going down on a channel.
So let me set the stage again.
In this podcast, right beforeall this, he's talking about how
the numbers went down about 30or so percent, just kind of out
of nowhere.
And in this particular part ofthe podcast he's reflecting on
the possibility that it is justthat channel and he does go
(04:02):
through some of the reasons thatit could be the channel like
they.
They've changed a little bit ofthe format, they had some
controversies in the past, allthese different things and he's
kind of rationalizing it in theway that we would normally tell
a channel hey, it's probably youright, you fell off.
You fell off and I thought thatwas really first of all.
(04:23):
I thought that was, I respectedthat, because that's not
typically the thing you want tothink of as a creator.
You think mostly like, well, Ididn't change anything,
everything was working.
All of a sudden it stoppedworking.
Nine times out of ten Must beYouTube's fault.
Yeah, nine times out of ten,that's what we think.
Nine times out of ten.
What he just said is the facts.
It's maybe we did something,maybe we didn't change something
(04:49):
, maybe there's things going on.
People are interested in otherthings, that sort of thing.
So I liked that he came to thatconclusion and that was early
on and I think by this point inthe podcast I was like, yeah,
that's probably it, and I juststopped kind of paying attention
.
Do you remember, uh, that partof of that conversation and kind
of what you thought when youheard that?
Speaker 4 (05:00):
uh, yeah, I remember pretty well, like some of the
controversies surrounding himand it made sense.
I I kind of, as I was listeningthat part, I kind of had
forgotten that this wassomething they were talking
about.
That was sudden, so my brainwas kind of back to.
This has probably been comingfor a really long time.
You know, this channel's beenaround forever and any channel's
been around forever is going tojust kind of, you know, have to
continue to innovate, and ifthey don't, what's going to
(05:22):
happen?
But in in that channel's casein particular, there's there's
reasons people don't watchanymore.
Uh, and I'm not trying to getinto the controversy, I'm just
saying that is a thing.
There are people who don'twatch for reasons.
So and they admitted that, theyadmit that they talk about that
a little bit.
So it it was like, yeah, thisis probably them just out loud
saying it's time to make achange and what it gets into
(05:42):
from there, what it brought meback to.
Oh right, this was a suddenthing.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
This is actually like a little bit bigger than just
hey, people don't like usanymore one of the things that
when I did a lot of coaching forcreators is having that outside
look at at their content.
It's hard to separate yourselffrom your content because you
spend so much time doing it.
Um, and, like I said, therespect is you are the producer,
(06:08):
the editor, the script writer,all the things.
You're all these things, thetalent, everything all in one.
So it is very difficult attimes to be very rational about
your product, which is yourvideos, saying, yeah, this one
wasn't as good, or these threeweren't as good, or I'm actually
trying something new, so Ishould expect views to go down.
The rationalization is accurate, like, yeah, well, okay, maybe
(06:33):
I am doing something wrong.
However, as it turns out, somemore people kind of dove into
this and there were a lot ofother YouTubers that started
saying, well, wait a minute.
There are other things we'reseeing about this that are
happening to multiple people atthe same time during the same
date range.
One of the first things thatpeople started to pull up uh,
(06:55):
was restricted mode talkingabout.
Now, we've talked aboutrestricted mode a couple of
times here.
I'm going to use a little clipfrom uh, the spiffing brit.
Uh, he talks a little bit aboutrestricted mode.
We're going to watch thislittle segment right here, just
to use a little clip from thespiffing Brit.
He talks a little bit aboutrestricted mode.
We're going to watch thislittle segment right here just
to get a little bit of feedbackon what he talked about for it
and also, if you don't know whatit is, it'll give a little bit
of information.
We'll give the rest once hissegment is over.
(07:18):
So let's get to that.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
I don't think most people know what restricted mode
is.
It's a feature that wasn'tadded in September.
It's a feature that wasn't evenadded in August.
It's been a part of YouTubesince, probably before you
started using the platform.
It's a feature that exists torestrict potentially mature
content from being shown.
Its sole purpose is so thatplaces like schools and
libraries can have access toYouTube without the fear that a
(07:40):
child is watching a GTA 5 let'sPlay because the game is
technically for adults.
It's not perfect.
There's definitely a lot ofvideos that slip through the
cracks, but it's a good enoughchange to make a very big
platform slightly safer for kids.
In 2017, restricted modeaccounted for a mere 1.5 percent
of views on the platform, and Ihonestly expect this number to
be even lower now, as it'sreally not a popular feature.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Restricted mode is not the cause for less views and
you know his conclusion is notthe cause for less views.
I agree with this because inthe past we have found channels
that are highly popular, umvoice critical being one of
those.
That's almost his entirechannel is almost completely in
restricted mode.
So, again for people who didn'tunderstand what was just said
there, there is an option, uh,in your, when you're on youtube,
(08:24):
in your login, to turn onrestricted mode, and what that
does is it finds um videos thatwould be quote inappropriate for
usually kids of you know, likeif you're in a library, like you
don't want to see all theshenanigans and whatnot, and it
keeps them from showing up.
And sure, that does mean thatcertain videos won't show up for
certain people, but it's such asmall percentage of people that
that was never the thing.
And the reason that this, thissubject came up was because
(08:46):
recently youtube had made sometype of announcement about using
ai to try to figure out ifvideos would were recommended
for kids right, it was per.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
As I understood, it was per user.
It was trying to determine,based on your viewing habits,
whether or not you were of ageto see certain content.
Are you 18 or are you not 18?
Excuse me.
And this criticism comes from,like you know, people watching
all kinds of stuff, people havedifferent interests, and so
where is it getting the data onwhat is a kid's video, what's
not?
And I think it's natural toassume and I still don't know if
(09:18):
it's this way or not thatvideos in restricted mode are
likely the ones that would besafe for all ages, via this same
new, this new system, right?
So people are saying that ifyour video is in restricted mode
, then if so, facto, this is thenew youtube update that kind of
screwed everything up becausenobody was using restricted mode
and now it's on by default.
I don't think that's true.
I don't think restricted modeis what.
(09:39):
I don't think youtube justturns that on.
If your account is childaccount, a lot of things change
all of a sudden.
It's not just that it justautomatically turns on
restricted mode.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, I mean, even in the video it says restricted
mode is turned off by default.
Yes, the thing is again.
This has been around since 2010.
This is not a new feature, it'sjust the AI it conflated.
The problem was thisannouncement of using AI to kind
of figure out certain content.
Stuff happened around the sameexact time that these views
started to drop, and there'slike a date range of, like
August 9th through the 12th Somepeople were saying the 10th,
(10:10):
some people say like between the9th and 12th.
Somewhere around there, peoplestarted seeing like this thing
happen whatever this thing isand we'll talk more in depth
about what it looks like here ina second but a lot of people
conflated this with that, andthis happens a lot.
Uh, first of all, in life,let's be honest, but on youtube
especially, like something willhappen and people who maybe
don't understand the platform aswell will point at something,
(10:33):
and then when someone hearssomething, they'll jump on that
like, oh yeah, that makes sense,without doing any research or
anything, and then it becomes atalking point.
Yep, and from youtube's side, alot of times, they don't ever
get around to denying anything,which makes it worse.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
That makes people think, yep that's it and what
makes it hard for people in oursituation, because we didn't
jump on this right away.
When it comes to youtubeupdates, when it's coming from
the horse's mouth, we jump onupdates pretty quickly.
When it's about situations thatwe're all trying to like learn
about in real time, we tend totake our time a little bit more.
We don't react to them rightaway, and this was something
that I was watching on thesidelines very carefully because
I'm like I don't think it'sthat simple.
(11:08):
But when enough people aresaying it's got to be restricted
mode and in the, the creatorsare getting larger and larger
and I'm like I respect thesecreators, I watch them regularly
and they're saying it too.
Maybe I'm wrong, mayberestricted mode isn't on default
for me, but maybe they'retesting that.
Like I'm running through allthese different scenarios in my
head because I don't work atyoutube I just I felt relatively
confident.
It was definitely notrestricted mode, it was
(11:28):
definitely not aih verification,but I'm not saying these things
out loud because I'm justtaking it all in and I'm really
glad we waited because, as we'llget to um, yes, uh, it's it's.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
It turned out to be not those things, as far as
people can tell and the otherthing is like we almost shot
this yesterday and then anotherpiece of information came out
and I was like we just gottadamn, we just gotta wait an
extra day because, yeah, it'sconstantly changing and by the
time people hear this, maybeeven more comes out.
But I think at this point Ifeel like we have enough of a
solid kind of basis.
Eventually we're gonna getthere, trust me.
We just want to lay thefoundation of everything so you
(12:01):
can understand and be informed.
Yeah, because I think it'simportant to understand this
stuff.
The next time something likethis happens and it's not every
every year or so somethinghappens and views go down,
people panic, youtube's broken,blah, blah, blah.
So we're trying to analyze itreal time, show you what's going
on, and so all that to sayrestricted mode and and ai uh,
age verification nothing to dowith this, nothing to do with
(12:21):
this, um.
So while that was going on, Istarted seeing other creators uh
, in some of the niches I watchkind of start saying the same
thing, like yeah, my views aredown too, and and really
interesting that, like um, evenon our channel we saw it.
I can't go into too much detailbecause it's it would be a
whole episode in of itself, um,but we kind of saw the same
(12:42):
thing.
Unfortunately, some of our datawas a little bit dirty so it
was hard for us to actuallynotice it in the moment, but as
we look back, we can kind of seesimilar-ish things, but we
weren't as affected as some ofthese other channels.
I think there is a really goodreason why specific channels
seem to be affected.
Again, we'll get to that in aminute.
So, all that being said, therewas another podcast.
(13:03):
Uh, linus did again, and youknow they kind of think they
figured out some reallyinteresting aspects of why their
views are down.
We'll watch.
Uh, this thing happen, uh, andthis isn't everything this, this
episode has, um, or at least,this clip is like 30 minutes
long.
We're only gonna listen aminute or two, but there's a lot
(13:23):
of interesting information.
They pulled up some which Ithink is probably irrelevant.
One thing they did not do isshow their audience uh breakout,
which they should have.
But here's some.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Here's a particularly , particularly interesting
segment that they did talk aboutright like these two graphs
track really really closely witheach other until suddenly, at
the beginning of august, theydecouple all right, and I'm
going to explain what this graphis.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
If you're looking at the youtube video, you're going
to see this is a graph that oneof the people who works for
Linus put together.
This became one of the firstclues as to what was going on.
This is the views expectedversus the revenue they got per
view and per video.
What's interesting is what youwould normally expect, which is
(14:07):
what most of this graph shows isthe more views you got, the
more money you make.
Duh like hello.
Everyone knows this.
But what was interesting is isin this August timeframe, they
still were getting as much moneyas they were normally, but they
were getting less views.
That was the biggest monkeywrench in all of this.
(14:31):
When this was found out andthen people saw this information
and they started checking,they're like yeah, this is the
same for me.
And there was another thinglikes were up compared to views,
so you were getting many morelikes per view than you were
before this august date.
This was very confusing.
What were your thoughts as thisinformation was shared?
Speaker 4 (14:47):
so the thought I had immediately when they mentioned,
especially when they mentionedlikes- was that okay, if your
revenue and engagement are notchanging, relatively speaking,
video after video, that meansthe views you're losing here are
not real.
That was my thought.
Right, like you are gettingbots on your channel, we all
probably are and youtube hasdone something about the bots
(15:07):
and, at least temporarily, thisis what's going to look like now
.
The reason that my mind went tothat so fast was because over
on twitch, they very publiclyjust did a thing where they
flipped a switch and got rid ofa lot of bots and if you go and
look, there's all kinds ofstories about this.
Twitch's numbers are throughthe floor compared to where they
were because of this purge,this bot purge.
Now I do think that eventuallyit'll pick back up.
(15:28):
I think these, these botcompanies, are companies.
They're scrappy, they, they,they want to make their money
and they're going to figure itout.
So I'm thinking like everyone'smaking a big to do it.
Nothing.
Youtube got rid of fake viewsand that that's where my mind
was and I was pretty set on that.
Again, still not making a videohere, but IQ about it still.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I felt like so I'm going to talk about, because you
know, they didn't get to thispart about the financial stuff
till later.
In the podcast earlier on theytalked about how the likes were
higher.
I was thinking, well, okay,yeah, if they get rid of these
fake views, your likes per vieware going to be higher, because
the people who are liking yourvideo are people who are the
hardcores that are watching allof your stuff anyway.
So that actually makes sense.
So, like I was unmoved by thatbit of data, I was like, yeah,
(16:20):
of course you're going to havehigher likes per view Makes
sense to me.
When he said that he was makingas much money with less views
there are very few things onyoutube that I don't have an
explanation for, dan, that wasone of them.
When he said that I'm like Idon't know, this is a new one on
(16:41):
me uh, because it doesn't makea lot of sense.
You should be getting moreviews, uh, and getting more
revenue for those views.
If your views go down,inevitably your revenue does as
well.
But after kind of listening toa bit, I started to kind of
think the way you did, which is,some of these views aren't like
real or whatever, whatever youwant to call them.
Um, I think when something likethis, first of all, I can't
(17:06):
remember anything like this everhappening before, and you know,
linus has been around for manyyears.
They say they've never seenlike this before.
So so when things like thishappen, when we get something
new, a new piece of data we'venever seen before, my first
thing is to go okay, let's holdon.
Who else can verify this?
Who else has the same exactsituation?
Thankfully, these largerchannels were bringing it to the
(17:27):
attention of a lot of creators,who watched them, and they came
forward.
Channels were bringing it tothe attention of a lot of
creators, who watched them, andthey came forward and it was an
actual thing.
A lot of people had less viewsbut had the same amount of money
.
So for some people who makeyoutube videos for certain
reasons like money only they'relike okay, well then, there's
nothing wrong, nothing's broken.
But for others, the thing is,views are important to when
you're a bigger channel, tosponsors.
(17:49):
So as long as the money keepscoming in, as long as sponsors
don't care, then it's fine.
But if you are and they evenmention this in the video a
sponsor and you're like yeah, Imean last time, last video, you
got a million views and we paidmoney and it was good.
Now you're getting 500 000views.
I don't know we want to pay youas much money.
That's a little rough on thecreator.
It's like, well, wait a minute,what's going on?
Like I haven't done anythingdifferent.
So it is a big impact and a bigissue, even though the ad sense
(18:13):
money hasn't changed.
Overall, money can and, like wesay on this podcast a lot, ad
sense money is just a drop inthe bucket.
Um, did you, did you or any ofyour friends or any of the
people that you kind of hang outwith, uh, youtuber wise see the
same thing happen?
Were they seeing views up down?
Did the money stay the same?
What did you experience?
Speaker 4 (18:32):
yeah, I'm in.
I'm in a couple discords andstuff and, uh, one one in
particular.
It's full of youtube creators.
Everyone in there was talkingabout this.
They were all saying theirviews were down and it was just
kind of funny to watch thesechannels that are very big by
the way, some of them you'veheard of for sure, millions of
subscribers in some casestalking and and conspiracy,
conspiracy theorying, like therest of us, right, like, just
like youtube must have changedthis or that.
(18:54):
And, yes, everyone's noticingthere's also a few people in the
discord who were like, um,actually having a pretty good
month, and those the the onethere was one particular that
said that.
That I, I know, I've talked to,and they are a gaming channel.
So, uh, I'm talking to.
This is discord, full ofcreators of all different kinds
of channels and, of course, likethis one gaming channel is like
I'm doing pretty good and, uh,knowing what I know now, I feel
(19:16):
like that makes a lot of sense.
But, uh, yeah, we'll get intoit, but, yes, uh, in the moment
yeah, a lot of people noticedaround me yeah, and it's.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
It's interesting because that because it doesn't
make any sense.
It then makes you questioneverything.
I feel like at that point we'rebeing gaslit and the only thing
we wanted is for YouTube totell us anything.
And nine times out of ten,youtube won't say anything.
It's just like they justgenuinely and generally don't.
(19:46):
Sometimes they will, dependingon what's going on, but for the
most part, it's my opinion thattheir default answer is no
answer.
Sometimes it might be becausethey can't answer, other times
it might be because they don'thave an answer yet.
Um, but I feel like, ininstances where I don't know,
something like this is soimpactful that they should say
(20:08):
something like we're lookinginto it, or I don't know,
anything like this is soimpactful that they should say
something like we're lookinginto it or I don't know anything
.
Now, we'll get into a minute.
They did eventually saysomething, but I think it would
have been easier and better tosay at least we're looking into
it.
A week or two ago, when you know, stuff like this was blowing up
and I this is one of the thingsabout youtube is very
frustrating.
One of my uh, one of my friendsand a fellow creator has been
(20:28):
around for a long time.
Jonathan Morrison, big techYouTuber, just got demonetized
recently.
He's got 2.7 millionsubscribers.
He got demonetized because he'strying to change the bank
account in his AdSense notbecause of any of his content,
but because of like a glitch,like it wouldn't let him change
the bank or something, and whenhe did try to change it, because
it was broken a connection tolike his account.
(20:49):
Now he's demonetized across atwo million subscriber channel.
It's been around for like 10years or something and he's not
getting help.
They're like you gotta wait 30days or something.
It's just, it's a.
It's a very weird partnershipthat you have with youtube.
It's it's one-sided.
You don't generally know whatthe heck's going on and there's
(21:11):
not anyone you can specificallytalk to.
You know what I mean, dan.
Do you feel this way with?
I was thinking Rob.
Second time you call me Rob,yeah, sorry.
Do you feel this way, dan,about like it's not a parasocial
relationship, that's different.
That's with us and our viewers,but it's a different
relationship.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
It's like almost as bad it.
I'm numb to it at this point.
I feel like it's becauseyoutube is such a massive
corporation at this point thatand google and they can't say
much.
They can't say much about thisand I think the reason this is
my own tinfoil hat, but I thinkthe reason they don't say
anything most of the time isbecause they are trying to,
first and foremost, protecttheir company secrets, which I'm
sure there's plenty of, giventheir algorithms are so advanced
at this point.
They have to be careful and Ithink a lot of stuff runs
(21:53):
through lawyers before it runsthrough anything.
It's almost amazing that theyhave a social media account to
begin with.
It's not surprising that a lotof it is copy-paste, because
those are the messages that arelikely approved by lawyers.
And when you talk to platformslike Twitch on Twitter or
something like that, I don'tknow if they're the best example
.
I don't really follow them onsocial media, but I think people
(22:14):
have you know real peoplebehind them A lot of time.
They have experience talking toreal people at these companies,
whereas with YouTube, it takesa lot of time to get a real
person you have to really like.
I think the most frustratingthing for me is when somebody is
obviously being you knowsomething is happening to their
channel.
That is not fair and everyonecan see.
It's not fair and it only evergets attention when that
(22:36):
youtuber who is big enough goesand makes a hubbub and their
viewers make a hubbub or theyjust happen to get the attention
of a big creator who makes ahubbub on their behalf and I
hate.
I don't even go on twitteranymore.
Twitter is not my platformanymore.
I hate that.
That is the way to get aproblem solved on this platform.
That is frustrating, but itmakes sense because of just how
(23:00):
massive Google is at this point.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
A couple of years ago , and this was before Shorts,
the stat was 500 hours ofcontent uploaded every minute on
YouTube.
This was before youtube shorts.
I don't even know what it couldpossibly be now.
It's got to be like 2 000 hoursa minute, something like that,
something ridiculous.
First of all, who's buying allthe hard drives?
But I I think that it is aproblem because it's hard to.
(23:25):
How do you service all thesepeople, some of which are
genuine creators that, um, needhelp, and a lot of which are
genuine creators that need help,and a lot of them are people
who either A just don'tunderstand the system and are
kind of clogging up customerservice, who can even get
through to a customer service,right, but, like at a certain
channel size, you don't even geta chance at that.
Or people that are trying toscam the company, or something
(23:46):
like that.
You know what I mean.
So there's all these things youhave to wade through, but
you're right, like it takes alot of times a big creator
before something reallyseemingly gets done.
Uh, at some point during all ofthis, uh, a creator called josh
strife hayes, josh strife hayes,strife hayes, he, he did a.
Um, he did a video.
I didn't watch the first one,but he did a second video to
(24:06):
follow up, so he did a video.
Um, spiffing brit made a video,kind of.
Actually, let me set the stagethere's been some confusion.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
So I think what happened because I missed this,
but he made a video that heactually deleted because he was
going on about restricted mode.
Spiffing brit made a videoafter that.
He mentioned that josh haddeleted his restricted mode
video because he felt like hewas wrong.
And spiffing brit and joshstrife hayes know each other.
They've talked um now.
Then josh releases a videowhere he is saying I don't know
(24:35):
if he sees the spiffing brit oneat this point or not, but he is
saying, hey, this is the dataI'm looking at and the reason
this first one's important isbecause he this is when he asks
other creators to share datawith him and this one video
farms a ton of data from, Ithink, 80 something creators
that responded and then he makeshis follow-up and I think
that's what you're about to.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yes, so one of the things that came out during this
was remember that split earlierwe were talking about, where
the monetization kind of stayedthe same but the the views went
down.
One of the other things thatcame from this is that desktop
views went down and that becamekind of the catalyst to what I
believe the answer is, and Ithink Josh figured this out and
(25:19):
yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
We should explain, like on YouTube, in your
analytics.
These are there.
They're in a couple differentplaces One pretty easy to find,
I think, in your audience tab,and another hidden in advanced
mode.
But there's a few differenttypes of devices that youtube
categorizes it.
It goes tv, desktop or computer.
We'll use those interchangeablybecause I think it used to be
called desktop, but it just sayscomputer now desktop, um tv,
(25:43):
tablet and mobile.
There might even be another I.
I have a lot of tablet viewerson my channel.
I don't think that that IQ hastablet viewers very much.
Yeah, so I actually have tabletviewers represented.
Maybe that's just a test thatI'm in so they might add more
devices in the future, but as ofright now, I think those are
like the big four device typesthat people watch YouTube on.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
And this becomes important for strategies down
the line, like if you, if youhave a lot of television viewers
, you want to make your stufflook like a television show and
also, perhaps more importantly,it can be longer, because
people's attention span ontelevision is longer.
Uh, okay anyway.
So, all that being said, theinteresting thing was is from
the you know after the diggingis that desktop viewers were
down, and that was reallyinteresting because, while it
(26:26):
didn't exactly answerspecifically why money was up,
even though views were down,when you start to dig further
into it, you actually realizethere's a possible correlation
between that and ad blockers.
Now here's a section about whatJosh said in regards to this.
It's not the entire thing, butit is kind of the part where he
(26:46):
starts to wrap it up, and Ithink it's really critical to
listen to this very good stuff.
Speaker 5 (26:51):
Because the reduction in views was from desktop, and
yet we haven't seen a reductionin ad revenue.
I think we can then make twopoints the lost views were not
monetized views, because if theywere, we would have seen a
reduction in revenue, which wedidn't.
And computers both desktop andlaptop are more likely to have
(27:14):
third-party ad blockersinstalled than mobiles, tvs or
tablets.
But there's a third aspect tothis.
Youtube have claimed they havenot changed how long-form views
are recorded, and I think theyare telling the truth.
They haven't changed how theyshow the data they receive,
which leads me to two possibleconclusions Either a huge amount
(27:38):
of computer viewers all decidedon August 10th to collectively
stop watching a huge amount ofchannels all at once, which I
think is remarkably unlikely, ortwo, the data of the views
wasn't being sent to youtube,because it either didn't happen
or did happen and wasn't beingsent I I love this because it is
(28:01):
, of all the conversations thathave happened regarding this,
the thing that made the mostsense.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
um, something probably did change where
youtube either, because you knowin part of this too, he also
talks about and shows, andanyone who's been paying
attention knows that YouTube hasbeen fighting ad blockers for a
while, and I guess there was adate around this same time where
computers that had ad blockerson them couldn't even access
YouTube at all.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Yeah, it was AdMob Plus, I think.
Yeah, like that date, there's anews story around this.
There's also reddit posts thathe shows he did a lot of
research to get to thisconclusion.
It wasn't just, oh, desktopviews.
I'll make this assumption.
He went in and, like, reallyfound people at that same exact
time saying why is youtubeloading?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
and, you know, turned out ad blocker and again, that
makes sense because, from thethe monetized view perspective,
you're not losing money.
Well, an ad blocker and again,that makes sense because, from
the the monetized viewperspective, you're not losing
money Well, an ad blockerdoesn't give you money anyway.
So that is an actual scenariowhere whereby you know you would
see less views, but your moneywould stay the same.
Now, before this came out, Iwas thinking well, maybe they
(29:05):
just changed the way they docounts, uh, and they're just not
counting like a body of views,or you were talking about
earlier, and that could also bethe same thing.
But this makes more sensebecause, if you think about it,
the one thing youtube has donerecently when it comes to views
is inflate them with shorts.
Uh, they count them differentlynow, as impressions rather than
views.
So they, that number, went up.
(29:27):
It seems unlikely that theywould change anything to make
the views look downward.
If anything, they're going tomake them look more, not less.
So this again checks anothermark in the potential of this
being the thing.
And then, a day or so later,for me the final nail in the
coffin, uh, renee ritchie, whois the youtube liaison, uh, on
(29:47):
twitter, has shared this wherehe says viewers, you and again
the question was um, from uh,lon sideman, who's uh uh, he's
been around for a long time.
He's a tech youtuber.
Uh, how does a video with only2,000 views, uh get 1600, 1100
likes, which is crazy?
Uh, and this is one of thethings we were talking about.
We get a lot of likes for viewsand he goes and Rene quotes a
(30:10):
help page and also links thehelp page.
Viewers using ad blockers andother content blocking tools, ad
blockers and other extensionscan impact the accuracy of
reported view counts.
Channels with audiences with ahigher proportion of users
utilizing such tools may seefluctuations in traffic related
to updates using these tools andbing.
That's what made the most sense, because a lot of the people
(30:33):
that I had seen complainingabout this were tech channels
and notoriously, viewers of techchannels have ad blockers.
They're proud of it, howthey've installed this ad
blocker.
I don't have to watch the block.
I'm going to watch my and it'stech channels.
A lot of the channels that wereunaffected were these channels
that you would think.
Their viewership may not evenknow what an ad blocker is and
(30:54):
their stuff wasn't affected.
I think you said you knew somepeople that were similar to that
.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
So what I was saying earlier is the gaming channel I
was talking about that theyweren't noticing anything, and
gaming channels oftentimes havea younger audience, and I think
it was Moist Critical who wassaying because he was covering
the Josh Trepey's video, and inhis video I agree with his
opinion A lot of younger viewersdon't really know what an ad
(31:18):
blocker is or care to installone, and so you know, yes,
there's probably some channelsout there that feel like I don't
know what everyone's going onabout and they might have a
younger audience or an audiencethat is not as tech savvy to
have one of these installed.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
And I think it's important to so.
First of all, rene was a formertech YouTuber too.
I've known Rene for many years.
I knew him before he had thisjob.
He's very specifically pointingthis out and I guarantee you
he's seen all these videos.
Yeah, so again he to you.
He's seen all these videos.
Yeah, so again, he linked to thehelp page, but he pulled out
that part about ad blockers andstuff, which is something that
josh said in his video, notbecause he randomly chose one
(31:54):
section out of that help page.
He's saying without saying joshkind of got it right.
This is confirmation withoutconfirmation.
And then later on in the thinghe goes youtube hasn't made any
changes to how long form viewsare counted, including desktop,
which is further confirmation.
Further pushes you into thefact that I believe also josh
got it right, which I'm justgonna say kudos because, as he
(32:17):
says, he doesn't even likemaking videos like that.
It's not his normal thing,usually makes games, videos
about games, yet figured outsomething would have been very
difficult that even people whoare really into this sort of
thing didn't figure out likecrazy.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
I'm thoroughly impressed yeah, he's done some
incredible work here.
Uh, just shout to him he's.
He's been on the channel before.
I've talked to him in thecontext of, like, starting a
gaming channel, things like that.
He's volunteered his time, he's.
He's really gracious and smartand, uh, this was really cool to
see from him.
I have one question.
I don't think this is for Joshor anyone.
(32:50):
I'm also not doubting hisresearch or conclusions, but my
one question about this wholething is if it's true that ad
blockers made the desktopversion of YouTube not
functional for so many people,why did that last so many days
and I'm pretty sure it's stillgoing on?
Right, views the lower.
Why is it that all of thosefolks gave up?
(33:14):
Like, what happened to them?
Yeah, like so many people stopwatching youtube.
Did they just get mad and go totwitch?
They didn't pick up theirphones ago.
I guess I'll watch on phonetoday.
Yeah, if you were going toyoutube with the intent to watch
something, you wouldn't juststop watching for weeks and
weeks, right, like yeah, I thinkwild.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
It's hard to know, like so.
One thing is if, if theyprimarily watch on their
computer, they might just thinkyoutube's down, because one of
the other things that that wentup I think in this video we
talked about was the searchesfor is youtube down, went up
that same kind of right, andthat was probably from all the
people that had app lockersinstalled and it could be that
they just watch something else.
It could be they watch on adifferent device.
It could be that those viewswould have been on the homepage
(33:55):
and when they came in on anotherdevice, those videos that would
have been promoted to them ontheir homepage were no longer
being promoted to them on theirother device Because, as you
know, some promoted to them ontheir homepage were no longer
being promoted to them on theirother device.
Because, as you know, some ifyou watch on your phone versus
watch on your desktop, differentvideos sometimes are completely
recommended to you depending onthe device you're on.
So if you're no longer on yourdesktop and you look on your
(34:16):
phone, you may not get promotedan hour long video, because they
know on your phone you neverwatch an hour long video, but on
your desktop, you might, and onyour TV you might, so it, tv
you might so it.
I mean, some of the numbers werereally large, so it's a lot of
people to think like that.
Many people have uh extensionsinstalled, maybe, but again, it
might have not just been plugins.
It might have been that, alongwith maybe some of the bots,
some of the other things wetalked about.
(34:37):
But I do believe, just based onall the information uh kind of
gathered, but that is prettymuch probably what happened.
Now, yeah, as a creator, you'relike well, now, what do I do?
Speaker 3 (34:48):
nothing there's nothing you can do.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
You can put this as a part of the trailer too.
There's nothing you can do.
It's over.
It's over.
No, it's not over.
There's nothing you can do.
There's nothing you need toworry about doing.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
Make great content that's always the best advice.
I think is because we we giveso much advice and a lot of
people don't want to follow it.
They'd rather they'd rather not.
So this is the one time we'regiving you the advice to not do
anything, right I?
I have sorry, just being alittle salty that's true I have
like two conclusions orpredictions I don't know you
want to call them, yeah.
(35:19):
The first is that I don't thinkthis goes away overnight.
I think this happens again uhsoon.
In fact, I I think the the warbetween ad block and youtube is
just starting and we are goingto see more wacky things going
on and, I think, going forward.
It's safe for us to assume thatwhen things look a little bit
strange, you should probably gothis direction with your first
(35:40):
assumption, you know, and thendo some research from there
within your data, because thatthat is going to continue and it
makes sense.
Desktop is very easy to getadblock installed, mobile and
stuff not so much, so makes aton of sense.
Um, that's, that is one thing,and there's another thing I
can't remember what it wasthat's all right, I mean if
(36:00):
it'll come back to.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
I hate that.
Same things happen to me when Iget on a.
I get on a train track ofthought and then then I get
derailed.
It never comes back.
I miss the train.
So that was a good first one,though I liked the first half.
Yeah, I think I'm pretty smart.
Speaker 4 (36:12):
I wish I knew part two Also.
It felt equally smart.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
That's what this podcast is all about, baby.
We give you part of it and thenthe rest we don't remember, and
hopefully you'll come back tolisten to another episode where
we give you another half bit ofinformation and then you come
back the next episode after that.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Oh, I was gonna say, okay, that's the second one, the
second one's for youtube.
I believe that this is still aa burning hot fire that you're
not putting out the right way.
Why is adblock so popular?
It is because YouTube is aplatform.
In my personal opinion not theopinions of vidIQ, just my
personal opinion you've gone alittle bit nuts with ads.
(36:54):
Now I'm not even saying theamount of ads.
I am saying that people havebeen pointing out for ages that
there are dangerous ads thatpromote scams on this platform
constantly, and I know the daythat gets addressed, we're not
going to hear about it in a newsstory.
It's just going to quietly goaway, and maybe it already has,
and people aren't talking.
I don't know.
(37:14):
The last I heard is that'sstill very alive and well, is
that ads promoting scams arestill on this platform, and I
want to see some work done there.
Youtube is doing a lot toprevent people from using ad
blockers done there.
Youtube is doing a lot toprevent people from using ad
blockers, but I don't feel likethey're doing enough to then
give us back something in returnif if I can't use an ad blocker
, which I'm not, I'm, I'm onpremium, very happy premium
subscriber okay, but if I can'tuse one, right then what am I
(37:37):
going to get in return?
Scammed like I need, I needsomething in exchange.
And another thing this is atotal aside, but they have
memberships for channels.
If premium's a little toocostly, make it so people can
set up a membership for theirchannel where one of the perks
is not seeing ads on thatparticular channel At least.
Then you get money still andyour favorite creators, like you
(37:58):
, can choose which creators asthe viewer you want to give that
money to.
And you know, youtube gets a cutand then there's no ads on that
particular channel for you, andI feel like that's a cut, and
then there's no ads on thatparticular channel for you, and
I feel like that's a very fairthing and I feel like that would
be a really nice trade.
When you do something thatmakes consumers kind of angry,
you can buy back some goodwillby doing something in return.
That's like we get.
We did get rid of this thingand I know you're not gonna like
that, but we give you thisinstead and we're not getting
(38:18):
the this instead part, and Ifeel like situations like this
are going to continue to bubbleover and distract everyone from
making awesome videos because,like, we're just so invested in
that drama when YouTube could doa lot to just kind of get ahead
of this.
And this is just going to morefrom a personal place of
frustration.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
No, I get it, and with some of the things that
were announced today which we'lltalk about in a future episode,
even weirder for like ads andstuff for live streams and
whatnot.
But we'll definitely get inthat in the next episode.
If you've been affected bythese, download these down views
, send us an email.
The boost at vidIQcom If you'relistening to the audio podcast,
there's a link in the shownotes where you can send us a
text message.
We want to hear has thisaffected you?
(38:57):
What do you think about all ofthis?
It's a lot to take in.
Hopefully we've kind of got youcaught up.
Maybe you didn't even knowanything about this and we just
caught you completely up.
Or maybe you know bits andpieces of it but didn't know,
kind of, the end result.
I believe this is kind of thethe end of this as far as, like
what happened because of reneeritchie's tweet.
If we didn't get that, I wouldsay this is probably the the
solution.
(39:17):
But I think that tweet kind ofuh kind of solves that, uh, that
mystery.
But I think also, dan's correct, this is just the beginning.
We may see other weird stuffhappening, uh, but that's what
youtube is it's it's just abunch of weird stuff happening
all at the same time, all thetime, anyway, all the time.
We thank you so much forjoining us.
We will see y'all in the nextone.
So it wasn't restricted mode, it wasn't AI,
it wasn't any of those things.
We're going to tell you exactlywhat the problem was right now.
Welcome back to the onlypodcast that comes to you when
something breaking happens.
Because it's broken, get it.
What a pun that was.
I'm Travis and I'm here with Dan.
Hey, you're good at puns, I'mpunny, but today's subject is
(00:23):
not punny.
It is about how we're allcanceled.
It's over for us.
Youtube has crashed.
It's dead.
We're done.
This is our last video.
It's been nice.
Thanks everybody for usingyoutube.
It's over.
It's been over.
Yeah, that no one's gettingviews anymore.
It's terrible.
It's a terrible time on youtube, not really so.
There's a lot going on.
There's a lot of um.
There's some truth to some ofthe things you may have heard
(00:44):
recently, which is you's a lotgoing on.
There's a lot of um.
There's some truth to some ofthe things you may have heard
recently, which is you know, alot of big youtubers are talking
about how their views are down,and smaller youtubers as well,
every every youtuber.
There's a lot of differentyoutubers, and then there's some
that are like no, nothing'snothing's changed.
Probably reasons for this.
We're going to get into some ofthose reasons today.
Today's uh video is all aboutviews on youtube, which is what
you all care about.
But something's been going onlately and, for those of you who
(01:05):
have not been paying attention,a couple of larger creators
have recently stated that sinceabout mid-August of this year,
views have been declining fortheir channels, and this happens
from time to time on YouTubefor a variety of reasons.
The ones that are normal areseasonal, in other words,
certain times of the year youcan bet on views being terrible,
(01:28):
january being one of those.
Beginning of summertime, a lotof time is the other, and then
going back to school aroundSeptember actually, ironically,
around this time would be athird.
But this is different.
There's different markers inthis that are kind of showing
that something different isgoing on.
Dan, when did you first hearabout this latest controversy
(01:50):
about views going down and whatdo you remember?
Because, again, this was acouple of weeks ago when it kind
of started, but we're startingto see the videos now.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Yeah, I think right around when Linus uploaded their
podcast clip about it.
Someone sent it to me and Iwatched it, and you know it's
hard to know in the moment ifyou're looking at a channel that
is complaining about views ontheir end and they have a lot
(02:18):
the stakes are high over there.
They have a bunch of employeesand people who work on that
channel.
The channel is the lifeblood ofthe whole operation, and so if
it's going down, they have to beconcerned, and this points to
an issue that I believe themthat they were having this issue
, but I didn't quite see it yetas like a widespread sort of
thing.
I think it was the catalyst,though, but maybe someone else
(02:38):
was already tapping into this.
They just weren't as big.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
So I'm going to show a real quick clip of that
particular podcast episodeyou're talking about and I
definitely recommend watching ifyou have not already seen it,
or at least parts of it anyway,because as a YouTuber, it's
interesting stuff when heexplains, ultimately after
saying like the views are downand we're seeing some weird
things, and again, this was kindof early on, so he didn't
really have a lot of information.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Some of his conclusions I thought it's
pretty interesting.
Here we go.
So it's it's a little confusingright now, but you know, it's
one of those things whereyoutube always tells us you know
, uh, when, wherever you wouldsay algorithm, you have to say
audience, where you're trying tosort of diagnose, you know what
you need to do to help thechannel performance.
(03:28):
And so we've got to askourselves okay, well, what is it
about?
Whether it's our packaging orwhether it's our content that is
not delighting our audience?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Now this is 99% of the case when you see views
going down on a channel.
So let me set the stage again.
In this podcast, right beforeall this, he's talking about how
the numbers went down about 30or so percent, just kind of out
of nowhere.
And in this particular part ofthe podcast he's reflecting on
the possibility that it is justthat channel and he does go
(04:02):
through some of the reasons thatit could be the channel like
they.
They've changed a little bit ofthe format, they had some
controversies in the past, allthese different things and he's
kind of rationalizing it in theway that we would normally tell
a channel hey, it's probably youright, you fell off.
You fell off and I thought thatwas really first of all.
(04:23):
I thought that was, I respectedthat, because that's not
typically the thing you want tothink of as a creator.
You think mostly like, well, Ididn't change anything,
everything was working.
All of a sudden it stoppedworking.
Nine times out of ten Must beYouTube's fault.
Yeah, nine times out of ten,that's what we think.
Nine times out of ten.
What he just said is the facts.
It's maybe we did something,maybe we didn't change something
(04:49):
, maybe there's things going on.
People are interested in otherthings, that sort of thing.
So I liked that he came to thatconclusion and that was early
on and I think by this point inthe podcast I was like, yeah,
that's probably it, and I juststopped kind of paying attention
.
Do you remember, uh, that partof of that conversation and kind
of what you thought when youheard that?
Speaker 4 (05:00):
uh, yeah, I remember pretty well, like some of the
controversies surrounding himand it made sense.
I I kind of, as I was listeningthat part, I kind of had
forgotten that this wassomething they were talking
about.
That was sudden, so my brainwas kind of back to.
This has probably been comingfor a really long time.
You know, this channel's beenaround forever and any channel's
been around forever is going tojust kind of, you know, have to
continue to innovate, and ifthey don't, what's going to
(05:22):
happen?
But in in that channel's casein particular, there's there's
reasons people don't watchanymore.
Uh, and I'm not trying to getinto the controversy, I'm just
saying that is a thing.
There are people who don'twatch for reasons.
So and they admitted that, theyadmit that they talk about that
a little bit.
So it it was like, yeah, thisis probably them just out loud
saying it's time to make achange and what it gets into
(05:42):
from there, what it brought meback to.
Oh right, this was a suddenthing.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
This is actually like a little bit bigger than just
hey, people don't like usanymore one of the things that
when I did a lot of coaching forcreators is having that outside
look at at their content.
It's hard to separate yourselffrom your content because you
spend so much time doing it.
Um, and, like I said, therespect is you are the producer,
(06:08):
the editor, the script writer,all the things.
You're all these things, thetalent, everything all in one.
So it is very difficult attimes to be very rational about
your product, which is yourvideos, saying, yeah, this one
wasn't as good, or these threeweren't as good, or I'm actually
trying something new, so Ishould expect views to go down.
The rationalization is accurate, like, yeah, well, okay, maybe
(06:33):
I am doing something wrong.
However, as it turns out, somemore people kind of dove into
this and there were a lot ofother YouTubers that started
saying, well, wait a minute.
There are other things we'reseeing about this that are
happening to multiple people atthe same time during the same
date range.
One of the first things thatpeople started to pull up uh,
(06:55):
was restricted mode talkingabout.
Now, we've talked aboutrestricted mode a couple of
times here.
I'm going to use a little clipfrom uh, the spiffing brit.
Uh, he talks a little bit aboutrestricted mode.
We're going to watch thislittle segment right here, just
to use a little clip from thespiffing Brit.
He talks a little bit aboutrestricted mode.
We're going to watch thislittle segment right here just
to get a little bit of feedbackon what he talked about for it
and also, if you don't know whatit is, it'll give a little bit
of information.
We'll give the rest once hissegment is over.
(07:18):
So let's get to that.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
I don't think most people know what restricted mode
is.
It's a feature that wasn'tadded in September.
It's a feature that wasn't evenadded in August.
It's been a part of YouTubesince, probably before you
started using the platform.
It's a feature that exists torestrict potentially mature
content from being shown.
Its sole purpose is so thatplaces like schools and
libraries can have access toYouTube without the fear that a
(07:40):
child is watching a GTA 5 let'sPlay because the game is
technically for adults.
It's not perfect.
There's definitely a lot ofvideos that slip through the
cracks, but it's a good enoughchange to make a very big
platform slightly safer for kids.
In 2017, restricted modeaccounted for a mere 1.5 percent
of views on the platform, and Ihonestly expect this number to
be even lower now, as it'sreally not a popular feature.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Restricted mode is not the cause for less views and
you know his conclusion is notthe cause for less views.
I agree with this because inthe past we have found channels
that are highly popular, umvoice critical being one of
those.
That's almost his entirechannel is almost completely in
restricted mode.
So, again for people who didn'tunderstand what was just said
there, there is an option, uh,in your, when you're on youtube,
(08:24):
in your login, to turn onrestricted mode, and what that
does is it finds um videos thatwould be quote inappropriate for
usually kids of you know, likeif you're in a library, like you
don't want to see all theshenanigans and whatnot, and it
keeps them from showing up.
And sure, that does mean thatcertain videos won't show up for
certain people, but it's such asmall percentage of people that
that was never the thing.
And the reason that this, thissubject came up was because
(08:46):
recently youtube had made sometype of announcement about using
ai to try to figure out ifvideos would were recommended
for kids right, it was per.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
As I understood, it was per user.
It was trying to determine,based on your viewing habits,
whether or not you were of ageto see certain content.
Are you 18 or are you not 18?
Excuse me.
And this criticism comes from,like you know, people watching
all kinds of stuff, people havedifferent interests, and so
where is it getting the data onwhat is a kid's video, what's
not?
And I think it's natural toassume and I still don't know if
(09:18):
it's this way or not thatvideos in restricted mode are
likely the ones that would besafe for all ages, via this same
new, this new system, right?
So people are saying that ifyour video is in restricted mode
, then if so, facto, this is thenew youtube update that kind of
screwed everything up becausenobody was using restricted mode
and now it's on by default.
I don't think that's true.
I don't think restricted modeis what.
(09:39):
I don't think youtube justturns that on.
If your account is childaccount, a lot of things change
all of a sudden.
It's not just that it justautomatically turns on
restricted mode.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, I mean, even in the video it says restricted
mode is turned off by default.
Yes, the thing is again.
This has been around since 2010.
This is not a new feature, it'sjust the AI it conflated.
The problem was thisannouncement of using AI to kind
of figure out certain content.
Stuff happened around the sameexact time that these views
started to drop, and there'slike a date range of, like
August 9th through the 12th Somepeople were saying the 10th,
(10:10):
some people say like between the9th and 12th.
Somewhere around there, peoplestarted seeing like this thing
happen whatever this thing isand we'll talk more in depth
about what it looks like here ina second but a lot of people
conflated this with that, andthis happens a lot.
Uh, first of all, in life,let's be honest, but on youtube
especially, like something willhappen and people who maybe
don't understand the platform aswell will point at something,
(10:33):
and then when someone hearssomething, they'll jump on that
like, oh yeah, that makes sense,without doing any research or
anything, and then it becomes atalking point.
Yep, and from youtube's side, alot of times, they don't ever
get around to denying anything,which makes it worse.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
That makes people think, yep that's it and what
makes it hard for people in oursituation, because we didn't
jump on this right away.
When it comes to youtubeupdates, when it's coming from
the horse's mouth, we jump onupdates pretty quickly.
When it's about situations thatwe're all trying to like learn
about in real time, we tend totake our time a little bit more.
We don't react to them rightaway, and this was something
that I was watching on thesidelines very carefully because
I'm like I don't think it'sthat simple.
(11:08):
But when enough people aresaying it's got to be restricted
mode and in the, the creatorsare getting larger and larger
and I'm like I respect thesecreators, I watch them regularly
and they're saying it too.
Maybe I'm wrong, mayberestricted mode isn't on default
for me, but maybe they'retesting that.
Like I'm running through allthese different scenarios in my
head because I don't work atyoutube I just I felt relatively
confident.
It was definitely notrestricted mode, it was
(11:28):
definitely not aih verification,but I'm not saying these things
out loud because I'm justtaking it all in and I'm really
glad we waited because, as we'llget to um, yes, uh, it's it's.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
It turned out to be not those things, as far as
people can tell and the otherthing is like we almost shot
this yesterday and then anotherpiece of information came out
and I was like we just gottadamn, we just gotta wait an
extra day because, yeah, it'sconstantly changing and by the
time people hear this, maybeeven more comes out.
But I think at this point Ifeel like we have enough of a
solid kind of basis.
Eventually we're gonna getthere, trust me.
We just want to lay thefoundation of everything so you
(12:01):
can understand and be informed.
Yeah, because I think it'simportant to understand this
stuff.
The next time something likethis happens and it's not every
every year or so somethinghappens and views go down,
people panic, youtube's broken,blah, blah, blah.
So we're trying to analyze itreal time, show you what's going
on, and so all that to sayrestricted mode and and ai uh,
age verification nothing to dowith this, nothing to do with
(12:21):
this, um.
So while that was going on, Istarted seeing other creators uh
, in some of the niches I watchkind of start saying the same
thing, like yeah, my views aredown too, and and really
interesting that, like um, evenon our channel we saw it.
I can't go into too much detailbecause it's it would be a
whole episode in of itself, um,but we kind of saw the same
(12:42):
thing.
Unfortunately, some of our datawas a little bit dirty so it
was hard for us to actuallynotice it in the moment, but as
we look back, we can kind of seesimilar-ish things, but we
weren't as affected as some ofthese other channels.
I think there is a really goodreason why specific channels
seem to be affected.
Again, we'll get to that in aminute.
So, all that being said, therewas another podcast.
(13:03):
Uh, linus did again, and youknow they kind of think they
figured out some reallyinteresting aspects of why their
views are down.
We'll watch.
Uh, this thing happen, uh, andthis isn't everything this, this
episode has, um, or at least,this clip is like 30 minutes
long.
We're only gonna listen aminute or two, but there's a lot
(13:23):
of interesting information.
They pulled up some which Ithink is probably irrelevant.
One thing they did not do isshow their audience uh breakout,
which they should have.
But here's some.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Here's a particularly , particularly interesting
segment that they did talk aboutright like these two graphs
track really really closely witheach other until suddenly, at
the beginning of august, theydecouple all right, and I'm
going to explain what this graphis.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
If you're looking at the youtube video, you're going
to see this is a graph that oneof the people who works for
Linus put together.
This became one of the firstclues as to what was going on.
This is the views expectedversus the revenue they got per
view and per video.
What's interesting is what youwould normally expect, which is
(14:07):
what most of this graph shows isthe more views you got, the
more money you make.
Duh like hello.
Everyone knows this.
But what was interesting is isin this August timeframe, they
still were getting as much moneyas they were normally, but they
were getting less views.
That was the biggest monkeywrench in all of this.
(14:31):
When this was found out andthen people saw this information
and they started checking,they're like yeah, this is the
same for me.
And there was another thinglikes were up compared to views,
so you were getting many morelikes per view than you were
before this august date.
This was very confusing.
What were your thoughts as thisinformation was shared?
Speaker 4 (14:47):
so the thought I had immediately when they mentioned,
especially when they mentionedlikes- was that okay, if your
revenue and engagement are notchanging, relatively speaking,
video after video, that meansthe views you're losing here are
not real.
That was my thought.
Right, like you are gettingbots on your channel, we all
probably are and youtube hasdone something about the bots
(15:07):
and, at least temporarily, thisis what's going to look like now
.
The reason that my mind went tothat so fast was because over
on twitch, they very publiclyjust did a thing where they
flipped a switch and got rid ofa lot of bots and if you go and
look, there's all kinds ofstories about this.
Twitch's numbers are throughthe floor compared to where they
were because of this purge,this bot purge.
Now I do think that eventuallyit'll pick back up.
(15:28):
I think these, these botcompanies, are companies.
They're scrappy, they, they,they want to make their money
and they're going to figure itout.
So I'm thinking like everyone'smaking a big to do it.
Nothing.
Youtube got rid of fake viewsand that that's where my mind
was and I was pretty set on that.
Again, still not making a videohere, but IQ about it still.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I felt like so I'm going to talk about, because you
know, they didn't get to thispart about the financial stuff
till later.
In the podcast earlier on theytalked about how the likes were
higher.
I was thinking, well, okay,yeah, if they get rid of these
fake views, your likes per vieware going to be higher, because
the people who are liking yourvideo are people who are the
hardcores that are watching allof your stuff anyway.
So that actually makes sense.
So, like I was unmoved by thatbit of data, I was like, yeah,
(16:20):
of course you're going to havehigher likes per view Makes
sense to me.
When he said that he was makingas much money with less views
there are very few things onyoutube that I don't have an
explanation for, dan, that wasone of them.
When he said that I'm like Idon't know, this is a new one on
(16:41):
me uh, because it doesn't makea lot of sense.
You should be getting moreviews, uh, and getting more
revenue for those views.
If your views go down,inevitably your revenue does as
well.
But after kind of listening toa bit, I started to kind of
think the way you did, which is,some of these views aren't like
real or whatever, whatever youwant to call them.
Um, I think when something likethis, first of all, I can't
(17:06):
remember anything like this everhappening before, and you know,
linus has been around for manyyears.
They say they've never seenlike this before.
So so when things like thishappen, when we get something
new, a new piece of data we'venever seen before, my first
thing is to go okay, let's holdon.
Who else can verify this?
Who else has the same exactsituation?
Thankfully, these largerchannels were bringing it to the
(17:27):
attention of a lot of creators,who watched them, and they came
forward.
Channels were bringing it tothe attention of a lot of
creators, who watched them, andthey came forward and it was an
actual thing.
A lot of people had less viewsbut had the same amount of money
.
So for some people who makeyoutube videos for certain
reasons like money only they'relike okay, well then, there's
nothing wrong, nothing's broken.
But for others, the thing is,views are important to when
you're a bigger channel, tosponsors.
(17:49):
So as long as the money keepscoming in, as long as sponsors
don't care, then it's fine.
But if you are and they evenmention this in the video a
sponsor and you're like yeah, Imean last time, last video, you
got a million views and we paidmoney and it was good.
Now you're getting 500 000views.
I don't know we want to pay youas much money.
That's a little rough on thecreator.
It's like, well, wait a minute,what's going on?
Like I haven't done anythingdifferent.
So it is a big impact and a bigissue, even though the ad sense
(18:13):
money hasn't changed.
Overall, money can and, like wesay on this podcast a lot, ad
sense money is just a drop inthe bucket.
Um, did you, did you or any ofyour friends or any of the
people that you kind of hang outwith, uh, youtuber wise see the
same thing happen?
Were they seeing views up down?
Did the money stay the same?
What did you experience?
Speaker 4 (18:32):
yeah, I'm in.
I'm in a couple discords andstuff and, uh, one one in
particular.
It's full of youtube creators.
Everyone in there was talkingabout this.
They were all saying theirviews were down and it was just
kind of funny to watch thesechannels that are very big by
the way, some of them you'veheard of for sure, millions of
subscribers in some casestalking and and conspiracy,
conspiracy theorying, like therest of us, right, like, just
like youtube must have changedthis or that.
(18:54):
And, yes, everyone's noticingthere's also a few people in the
discord who were like, um,actually having a pretty good
month, and those the the onethere was one particular that
said that.
That I, I know, I've talked to,and they are a gaming channel.
So, uh, I'm talking to.
This is discord, full ofcreators of all different kinds
of channels and, of course, likethis one gaming channel is like
I'm doing pretty good and, uh,knowing what I know now, I feel
(19:16):
like that makes a lot of sense.
But, uh, yeah, we'll get intoit, but, yes, uh, in the moment
yeah, a lot of people noticedaround me yeah, and it's.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
It's interesting because that because it doesn't
make any sense.
It then makes you questioneverything.
I feel like at that point we'rebeing gaslit and the only thing
we wanted is for YouTube totell us anything.
And nine times out of ten,youtube won't say anything.
It's just like they justgenuinely and generally don't.
(19:46):
Sometimes they will, dependingon what's going on, but for the
most part, it's my opinion thattheir default answer is no
answer.
Sometimes it might be becausethey can't answer, other times
it might be because they don'thave an answer yet.
Um, but I feel like, ininstances where I don't know,
something like this is soimpactful that they should say
(20:08):
something like we're lookinginto it, or I don't know,
anything like this is soimpactful that they should say
something like we're lookinginto it or I don't know anything
.
Now, we'll get into a minute.
They did eventually saysomething, but I think it would
have been easier and better tosay at least we're looking into
it.
A week or two ago, when you know, stuff like this was blowing up
and I this is one of the thingsabout youtube is very
frustrating.
One of my uh, one of my friendsand a fellow creator has been
(20:28):
around for a long time.
Jonathan Morrison, big techYouTuber, just got demonetized
recently.
He's got 2.7 millionsubscribers.
He got demonetized because he'strying to change the bank
account in his AdSense notbecause of any of his content,
but because of like a glitch,like it wouldn't let him change
the bank or something, and whenhe did try to change it, because
it was broken a connection tolike his account.
(20:49):
Now he's demonetized across atwo million subscriber channel.
It's been around for like 10years or something and he's not
getting help.
They're like you gotta wait 30days or something.
It's just, it's a.
It's a very weird partnershipthat you have with youtube.
It's it's one-sided.
You don't generally know whatthe heck's going on and there's
(21:11):
not anyone you can specificallytalk to.
You know what I mean, dan.
Do you feel this way with?
I was thinking Rob.
Second time you call me Rob,yeah, sorry.
Do you feel this way, dan,about like it's not a parasocial
relationship, that's different.
That's with us and our viewers,but it's a different
relationship.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
It's like almost as bad it.
I'm numb to it at this point.
I feel like it's becauseyoutube is such a massive
corporation at this point thatand google and they can't say
much.
They can't say much about thisand I think the reason this is
my own tinfoil hat, but I thinkthe reason they don't say
anything most of the time isbecause they are trying to,
first and foremost, protecttheir company secrets, which I'm
sure there's plenty of, giventheir algorithms are so advanced
at this point.
They have to be careful and Ithink a lot of stuff runs
(21:53):
through lawyers before it runsthrough anything.
It's almost amazing that theyhave a social media account to
begin with.
It's not surprising that a lotof it is copy-paste, because
those are the messages that arelikely approved by lawyers.
And when you talk to platformslike Twitch on Twitter or
something like that, I don'tknow if they're the best example
.
I don't really follow them onsocial media, but I think people
(22:14):
have you know real peoplebehind them A lot of time.
They have experience talking toreal people at these companies,
whereas with YouTube, it takesa lot of time to get a real
person you have to really like.
I think the most frustratingthing for me is when somebody is
obviously being you knowsomething is happening to their
channel.
That is not fair and everyonecan see.
It's not fair and it only evergets attention when that
(22:36):
youtuber who is big enough goesand makes a hubbub and their
viewers make a hubbub or theyjust happen to get the attention
of a big creator who makes ahubbub on their behalf and I
hate.
I don't even go on twitteranymore.
Twitter is not my platformanymore.
I hate that.
That is the way to get aproblem solved on this platform.
That is frustrating, but itmakes sense because of just how
(23:00):
massive Google is at this point.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
A couple of years ago , and this was before Shorts,
the stat was 500 hours ofcontent uploaded every minute on
YouTube.
This was before youtube shorts.
I don't even know what it couldpossibly be now.
It's got to be like 2 000 hoursa minute, something like that,
something ridiculous.
First of all, who's buying allthe hard drives?
But I I think that it is aproblem because it's hard to.
(23:25):
How do you service all thesepeople, some of which are
genuine creators that, um, needhelp, and a lot of which are
genuine creators that need help,and a lot of them are people
who either A just don'tunderstand the system and are
kind of clogging up customerservice, who can even get
through to a customer service,right, but, like at a certain
channel size, you don't even geta chance at that.
Or people that are trying toscam the company, or something
(23:46):
like that.
You know what I mean.
So there's all these things youhave to wade through, but
you're right, like it takes alot of times a big creator
before something reallyseemingly gets done.
Uh, at some point during all ofthis, uh, a creator called josh
strife hayes, josh strife hayes,strife hayes, he, he did a.
Um, he did a video.
I didn't watch the first one,but he did a second video to
(24:06):
follow up, so he did a video.
Um, spiffing brit made a video,kind of.
Actually, let me set the stagethere's been some confusion.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
So I think what happened because I missed this,
but he made a video that heactually deleted because he was
going on about restricted mode.
Spiffing brit made a videoafter that.
He mentioned that josh haddeleted his restricted mode
video because he felt like hewas wrong.
And spiffing brit and joshstrife hayes know each other.
They've talked um now.
Then josh releases a videowhere he is saying I don't know
(24:35):
if he sees the spiffing brit oneat this point or not, but he is
saying, hey, this is the dataI'm looking at and the reason
this first one's important isbecause he this is when he asks
other creators to share datawith him and this one video
farms a ton of data from, Ithink, 80 something creators
that responded and then he makeshis follow-up and I think
that's what you're about to.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yes, so one of the things that came out during this
was remember that split earlierwe were talking about, where
the monetization kind of stayedthe same but the the views went
down.
One of the other things thatcame from this is that desktop
views went down and that becamekind of the catalyst to what I
believe the answer is, and Ithink Josh figured this out and
(25:19):
yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
We should explain, like on YouTube, in your
analytics.
These are there.
They're in a couple differentplaces One pretty easy to find,
I think, in your audience tab,and another hidden in advanced
mode.
But there's a few differenttypes of devices that youtube
categorizes it.
It goes tv, desktop or computer.
We'll use those interchangeablybecause I think it used to be
called desktop, but it just sayscomputer now desktop, um tv,
(25:43):
tablet and mobile.
There might even be another I.
I have a lot of tablet viewerson my channel.
I don't think that that IQ hastablet viewers very much.
Yeah, so I actually have tabletviewers represented.
Maybe that's just a test thatI'm in so they might add more
devices in the future, but as ofright now, I think those are
like the big four device typesthat people watch YouTube on.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
And this becomes important for strategies down
the line, like if you, if youhave a lot of television viewers
, you want to make your stufflook like a television show and
also, perhaps more importantly,it can be longer, because
people's attention span ontelevision is longer.
Uh, okay anyway.
So, all that being said, theinteresting thing was is from
the you know after the diggingis that desktop viewers were
down, and that was reallyinteresting because, while it
(26:26):
didn't exactly answerspecifically why money was up,
even though views were down,when you start to dig further
into it, you actually realizethere's a possible correlation
between that and ad blockers.
Now here's a section about whatJosh said in regards to this.
It's not the entire thing, butit is kind of the part where he
(26:46):
starts to wrap it up, and Ithink it's really critical to
listen to this very good stuff.
Speaker 5 (26:51):
Because the reduction in views was from desktop, and
yet we haven't seen a reductionin ad revenue.
I think we can then make twopoints the lost views were not
monetized views, because if theywere, we would have seen a
reduction in revenue, which wedidn't.
And computers both desktop andlaptop are more likely to have
(27:14):
third-party ad blockersinstalled than mobiles, tvs or
tablets.
But there's a third aspect tothis.
Youtube have claimed they havenot changed how long-form views
are recorded, and I think theyare telling the truth.
They haven't changed how theyshow the data they receive,
which leads me to two possibleconclusions Either a huge amount
(27:38):
of computer viewers all decidedon August 10th to collectively
stop watching a huge amount ofchannels all at once, which I
think is remarkably unlikely, ortwo, the data of the views
wasn't being sent to youtube,because it either didn't happen
or did happen and wasn't beingsent I I love this because it is
(28:01):
, of all the conversations thathave happened regarding this,
the thing that made the mostsense.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
um, something probably did change where
youtube either, because you knowin part of this too, he also
talks about and shows, andanyone who's been paying
attention knows that YouTube hasbeen fighting ad blockers for a
while, and I guess there was adate around this same time where
computers that had ad blockerson them couldn't even access
YouTube at all.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Yeah, it was AdMob Plus, I think.
Yeah, like that date, there's anews story around this.
There's also reddit posts thathe shows he did a lot of
research to get to thisconclusion.
It wasn't just, oh, desktopviews.
I'll make this assumption.
He went in and, like, reallyfound people at that same exact
time saying why is youtubeloading?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
and, you know, turned out ad blocker and again, that
makes sense because, from thethe monetized view perspective,
you're not losing money.
Well, an ad blocker and again,that makes sense because, from
the the monetized viewperspective, you're not losing
money Well, an ad blockerdoesn't give you money anyway.
So that is an actual scenariowhere whereby you know you would
see less views, but your moneywould stay the same.
Now, before this came out, Iwas thinking well, maybe they
(29:05):
just changed the way they docounts, uh, and they're just not
counting like a body of views,or you were talking about
earlier, and that could also bethe same thing.
But this makes more sensebecause, if you think about it,
the one thing youtube has donerecently when it comes to views
is inflate them with shorts.
Uh, they count them differentlynow, as impressions rather than
views.
So they, that number, went up.
(29:27):
It seems unlikely that theywould change anything to make
the views look downward.
If anything, they're going tomake them look more, not less.
So this again checks anothermark in the potential of this
being the thing.
And then, a day or so later,for me the final nail in the
coffin, uh, renee ritchie, whois the youtube liaison, uh, on
(29:47):
twitter, has shared this wherehe says viewers, you and again
the question was um, from uh,lon sideman, who's uh uh, he's
been around for a long time.
He's a tech youtuber.
Uh, how does a video with only2,000 views, uh get 1600, 1100
likes, which is crazy?
Uh, and this is one of thethings we were talking about.
We get a lot of likes for viewsand he goes and Rene quotes a
(30:10):
help page and also links thehelp page.
Viewers using ad blockers andother content blocking tools, ad
blockers and other extensionscan impact the accuracy of
reported view counts.
Channels with audiences with ahigher proportion of users
utilizing such tools may seefluctuations in traffic related
to updates using these tools andbing.
That's what made the most sense, because a lot of the people
(30:33):
that I had seen complainingabout this were tech channels
and notoriously, viewers of techchannels have ad blockers.
They're proud of it, howthey've installed this ad
blocker.
I don't have to watch the block.
I'm going to watch my and it'stech channels.
A lot of the channels that wereunaffected were these channels
that you would think.
Their viewership may not evenknow what an ad blocker is and
(30:54):
their stuff wasn't affected.
I think you said you knew somepeople that were similar to that
.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
So what I was saying earlier is the gaming channel I
was talking about that theyweren't noticing anything, and
gaming channels oftentimes havea younger audience, and I think
it was Moist Critical who wassaying because he was covering
the Josh Trepey's video, and inhis video I agree with his
opinion A lot of younger viewersdon't really know what an ad
(31:18):
blocker is or care to installone, and so you know, yes,
there's probably some channelsout there that feel like I don't
know what everyone's going onabout and they might have a
younger audience or an audiencethat is not as tech savvy to
have one of these installed.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
And I think it's important to so.
First of all, rene was a formertech YouTuber too.
I've known Rene for many years.
I knew him before he had thisjob.
He's very specifically pointingthis out and I guarantee you
he's seen all these videos.
Yeah, so again he to you.
He's seen all these videos.
Yeah, so again, he linked to thehelp page, but he pulled out
that part about ad blockers andstuff, which is something that
josh said in his video, notbecause he randomly chose one
(31:54):
section out of that help page.
He's saying without saying joshkind of got it right.
This is confirmation withoutconfirmation.
And then later on in the thinghe goes youtube hasn't made any
changes to how long form viewsare counted, including desktop,
which is further confirmation.
Further pushes you into thefact that I believe also josh
got it right, which I'm justgonna say kudos because, as he
(32:17):
says, he doesn't even likemaking videos like that.
It's not his normal thing,usually makes games, videos
about games, yet figured outsomething would have been very
difficult that even people whoare really into this sort of
thing didn't figure out likecrazy.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
I'm thoroughly impressed yeah, he's done some
incredible work here.
Uh, just shout to him he's.
He's been on the channel before.
I've talked to him in thecontext of, like, starting a
gaming channel, things like that.
He's volunteered his time, he's.
He's really gracious and smartand, uh, this was really cool to
see from him.
I have one question.
I don't think this is for Joshor anyone.
(32:50):
I'm also not doubting hisresearch or conclusions, but my
one question about this wholething is if it's true that ad
blockers made the desktopversion of YouTube not
functional for so many people,why did that last so many days
and I'm pretty sure it's stillgoing on?
Right, views the lower.
Why is it that all of thosefolks gave up?
(33:14):
Like, what happened to them?
Yeah, like so many people stopwatching youtube.
Did they just get mad and go totwitch?
They didn't pick up theirphones ago.
I guess I'll watch on phonetoday.
Yeah, if you were going toyoutube with the intent to watch
something, you wouldn't juststop watching for weeks and
weeks, right, like yeah, I thinkwild.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
It's hard to know, like so.
One thing is if, if theyprimarily watch on their
computer, they might just thinkyoutube's down, because one of
the other things that that wentup I think in this video we
talked about was the searchesfor is youtube down, went up
that same kind of right, andthat was probably from all the
people that had app lockersinstalled and it could be that
they just watch something else.
It could be they watch on adifferent device.
It could be that those viewswould have been on the homepage
(33:55):
and when they came in on anotherdevice, those videos that would
have been promoted to them ontheir homepage were no longer
being promoted to them on theirother device Because, as you
know, some promoted to them ontheir homepage were no longer
being promoted to them on theirother device.
Because, as you know, some ifyou watch on your phone versus
watch on your desktop, differentvideos sometimes are completely
recommended to you depending onthe device you're on.
So if you're no longer on yourdesktop and you look on your
(34:16):
phone, you may not get promotedan hour long video, because they
know on your phone you neverwatch an hour long video, but on
your desktop, you might, and onyour TV you might, so it, tv
you might so it.
I mean, some of the numbers werereally large, so it's a lot of
people to think like that.
Many people have uh extensionsinstalled, maybe, but again, it
might have not just been plugins.
It might have been that, alongwith maybe some of the bots,
some of the other things wetalked about.
(34:37):
But I do believe, just based onall the information uh kind of
gathered, but that is prettymuch probably what happened.
Now, yeah, as a creator, you'relike well, now, what do I do?
Speaker 3 (34:48):
nothing there's nothing you can do.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
You can put this as a part of the trailer too.
There's nothing you can do.
It's over.
It's over.
No, it's not over.
There's nothing you can do.
There's nothing you need toworry about doing.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
Make great content that's always the best advice.
I think is because we we giveso much advice and a lot of
people don't want to follow it.
They'd rather they'd rather not.
So this is the one time we'regiving you the advice to not do
anything, right I?
I have sorry, just being alittle salty that's true I have
like two conclusions orpredictions I don't know you
want to call them, yeah.
(35:19):
The first is that I don't thinkthis goes away overnight.
I think this happens again uhsoon.
In fact, I I think the the warbetween ad block and youtube is
just starting and we are goingto see more wacky things going
on and, I think, going forward.
It's safe for us to assume thatwhen things look a little bit
strange, you should probably gothis direction with your first
(35:40):
assumption, you know, and thendo some research from there
within your data, because thatthat is going to continue and it
makes sense.
Desktop is very easy to getadblock installed, mobile and
stuff not so much, so makes aton of sense.
Um, that's, that is one thing,and there's another thing I
can't remember what it wasthat's all right, I mean if
(36:00):
it'll come back to.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
I hate that.
Same things happen to me when Iget on a.
I get on a train track ofthought and then then I get
derailed.
It never comes back.
I miss the train.
So that was a good first one,though I liked the first half.
Yeah, I think I'm pretty smart.
Speaker 4 (36:12):
I wish I knew part two Also.
It felt equally smart.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
That's what this podcast is all about, baby.
We give you part of it and thenthe rest we don't remember, and
hopefully you'll come back tolisten to another episode where
we give you another half bit ofinformation and then you come
back the next episode after that.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Oh, I was gonna say, okay, that's the second one, the
second one's for youtube.
I believe that this is still aa burning hot fire that you're
not putting out the right way.
Why is adblock so popular?
It is because YouTube is aplatform.
In my personal opinion not theopinions of vidIQ, just my
personal opinion you've gone alittle bit nuts with ads.
(36:54):
Now I'm not even saying theamount of ads.
I am saying that people havebeen pointing out for ages that
there are dangerous ads thatpromote scams on this platform
constantly, and I know the daythat gets addressed, we're not
going to hear about it in a newsstory.
It's just going to quietly goaway, and maybe it already has,
and people aren't talking.
I don't know.
(37:14):
The last I heard is that'sstill very alive and well, is
that ads promoting scams arestill on this platform, and I
want to see some work done there.
Youtube is doing a lot toprevent people from using ad
blockers done there.
Youtube is doing a lot toprevent people from using ad
blockers, but I don't feel likethey're doing enough to then
give us back something in returnif if I can't use an ad blocker
, which I'm not, I'm, I'm onpremium, very happy premium
subscriber okay, but if I can'tuse one, right then what am I
(37:37):
going to get in return?
Scammed like I need, I needsomething in exchange.
And another thing this is atotal aside, but they have
memberships for channels.
If premium's a little toocostly, make it so people can
set up a membership for theirchannel where one of the perks
is not seeing ads on thatparticular channel At least.
Then you get money still andyour favorite creators, like you
(37:58):
, can choose which creators asthe viewer you want to give that
money to.
And you know, youtube gets a cutand then there's no ads on that
particular channel for you, andI feel like that's a cut, and
then there's no ads on thatparticular channel for you, and
I feel like that's a very fairthing and I feel like that would
be a really nice trade.
When you do something thatmakes consumers kind of angry,
you can buy back some goodwillby doing something in return.
That's like we get.
We did get rid of this thingand I know you're not gonna like
that, but we give you thisinstead and we're not getting
(38:18):
the this instead part, and Ifeel like situations like this
are going to continue to bubbleover and distract everyone from
making awesome videos because,like, we're just so invested in
that drama when YouTube could doa lot to just kind of get ahead
of this.
And this is just going to morefrom a personal place of
frustration.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
No, I get it, and with some of the things that
were announced today which we'lltalk about in a future episode,
even weirder for like ads andstuff for live streams and
whatnot.
But we'll definitely get inthat in the next episode.
If you've been affected bythese, download these down views
, send us an email.
The boost at vidIQcom If you'relistening to the audio podcast,
there's a link in the shownotes where you can send us a
text message.
We want to hear has thisaffected you?
(38:57):
What do you think about all ofthis?
It's a lot to take in.
Hopefully we've kind of got youcaught up.
Maybe you didn't even knowanything about this and we just
caught you completely up.
Or maybe you know bits andpieces of it but didn't know,
kind of, the end result.
I believe this is kind of thethe end of this as far as, like
what happened because of reneeritchie's tweet.
If we didn't get that, I wouldsay this is probably the the
solution.
(39:17):
But I think that tweet kind ofuh kind of solves that, uh, that
mystery.
But I think also, dan's correct, this is just the beginning.
We may see other weird stuffhappening, uh, but that's what
youtube is it's it's just abunch of weird stuff happening
all at the same time, all thetime, anyway, all the time.
We thank you so much forjoining us.
We will see y'all in the nextone.
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