Counter-argument: Youtube's aggressive anti-ads campaign resulted in failed loads, videos that appear stuck, etc. The more techy people would have updated, but others were left with the choice of a buggy experience or dreadfully long ads. Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.
motrm · 52m ago
Jeff Geerling has been sleuthing into this lately too - my biggest takeaway is that it's only viewer counts that are suffering, he's not seen revenue drop which is key. Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)
Many youtubers have sponsorships though, and their viewership stats come into play when negotiating with potential sponsors.
I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.
dogleash · 39m ago
> Viewer counts are vanity, revenue is sanity :)
Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.
bluGill · 28m ago
Those buying baked in ads just need to find other ways to verify value. This is nothing new, no large company buys ads without checking how they really work (though many small companies would). There is someone who checks all those "how did you hear about us" responses asked at checkout - they want to know if the ad really provided value. Sure the TV stations tracked and reported ratings, but that is only one of the signs ad buyers look at, and it is one they only trust because they check and so would catch if it is manipulated.
The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.
Ajedi32 · 42m ago
I'm guessing the viewers who now suddenly aren't being counted were already not contributing to revenue because they block ads.
happytoexplain · 46m ago
You're saying that YouTube implemented a change that significantly reduces creators' viewer counts but won't affect their revenue, and they haven't told creators? "Here, have a heart attack"?
a_shovel · 17m ago
nobody's ever accused youtube of being too transparent with creators
pier25 · 4m ago
So Youtube changed how views are counted and is blaming ad blockers?
Wouldn't surprise me if we now see a new trend of "click like, bell, and suscribe and don't forget to disable your ad blocker!".
Obviously they don't care about these views since they are not generating ad revenue. Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals etc do care though.
NotPractical · 1h ago
Are views also decreasing on channels without ads enabled? Is it possible that some endpoint that needs to be hit to register a view is being blocked by privacy-related (not ad-related) lists that adblockers use?
If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
vintermann · 33m ago
> But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.
thewebguyd · 26m ago
> Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing"
Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.
The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.
It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.
Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.
s1mplicissimus · 54m ago
My current theory is that this whole "mystery around viewcounts" thing is fabricated by google.
From a PR viewpoint it's much better to just imply that adblockers are bad, so in case of backlash they can go "Idk why the community is going ham about this, we didn't even say directly you shouldn't adblock, you people are kwuaazy"
pimlottc · 56m ago
I agree, this seems more like a policy decision to turn creators into anti-adblocker advocates than a technical problem registering views accurately.
lotsofpulp · 37m ago
Why would most creators be pro ad blocking in the first place? Don’t most of them want to earn money via advertising?
bluGill · 17m ago
That isn't clear. Some earn money from ads of various forms. Some earn money from patreon like things and the youtube views are loss leaders. Most are not earning enough money from ads to care (generally 0, but sometimes a few bucks).
Even if you earn money from ads, view count is only a proxy at best. Youtube seems to track ads seen not view count (payments from youtube have not changed). Other ads track effectiveness of the ad, and viewcount is only a proxy - if youtube changes the count it means that the constant applied to viewcount in the formula changes but otherwise the payment is the same.
Thus if you get significant money from YouTube adds you care about ad blocking. None of the others need to care (they might, but it could go either way how they feel)
cogman10 · 19m ago
Because most creators use the internet and have experienced the internet with ads.
I imagine most don't think about ads seriously, they think about youtube and sponsor revenue.
jordanb · 55m ago
I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization. This is why the creators all do sponsorships now. But they force creators to monetize to get reach (if the video isn't monetized it won't be recommended, even to subscribers).
My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.
bluSCALE4 · 38m ago
Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage.
portaouflop · 3m ago
That’s crazy, when I am logged out I only get political garbage and the most insane braunrot you can imagine.
My recommendations are really good on YouTube, I find a lot of interesting stuff
izacus · 32m ago
> I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization.
Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?
the_af · 25m ago
I don't know the data but every YouTube author I follow is basically saying the money they get from YouTube is almost nothing compared to the effort they put into their videos. Almost all of them seem to be going for sponsored ads embedded in the video (so not automatically skippable) or Patreon.
ge96 · 50m ago
Is it possible not to have ads? It seems like YouTube puts them in there regardless, unless once your channel is monetizable you can choose to not show ads.
rwmj · 46m ago
Uploaders can disable mid-roll adverts, ie ones that appear in the middle of the content.
thrance · 17s ago
Putting my tinfoil hat on, maybe they knew ad blockers would mess with their new implementation and expected the freak out to mount "creators" against ad blockers?
imglorp · 49m ago
Could it be the recommendation algorithm is so terrible that people can't even?
Mine is just a sewage firehose so yes, I watch less now, and I use NewPipe on mobile to have a chance to see my subscriptions.
portaouflop · 2m ago
As noted above my recommendations are excellent and a source of great joy.
I don’t get how other people have such an inverse experience
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 43m ago
The trending page is usually so decadent and tasteless that I'm ashamed.
bluSCALE4 · 37m ago
Log out and you’ll be even more ashamed.
No comments yet
the_af · 30m ago
I wonder about this. I'm not discounting your experience, but my YouTube recommendation page is great.
I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.
I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.
This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).
SoftTalker · 21m ago
My recommendations are generally aligned with my interests as derived from my view history, likes, and subscriptions. But more and more of it is AI-generated or videos copied from the original creator and reposted by someone else. I try to use "don't show me videos fron this channel" on those but more and more just appears. I think there must be bots creating new channels and copying/generating content faster than I can block them.
And please, let me opt out of Shorts permanently. I keep telling them I don't want shorts but they always come back. I pay for a Premium account, so they should resepect my wishes on this.
the_af · 6m ago
Agreed on Shorts. I don't understand why YT is pushing so hard on those, they are never going to be TikTok and I repeatedly signal I don't want to see them.
vorpalhex · 3m ago
I did an experiment where I really invested in my YouTube suggestions, and you can definitely groom your recommendations, and then they can be pretty good. But then you have an issue where you get into a new hobby or a new interest, and so you watch some videos attributed to that, your recommendations spiral back out of control. So you can do a whole bunch of grooming work, but probably they just go back to being like 80% wrong. I got vaguely interested in the piano, and now 80% of my recommendations are music related, but not actually things I care about, and they've just gone back to being total trash.
mikert89 · 49m ago
I wish their algorithm would show me videos with my actual interests, instead of some kind of repeat material click maximization
smusamashah · 17m ago
I get good recommendations. They key is to not getting distracted by videos you don't really want to see in the feed. Its very tempting some times and watching just one video can mess up the feed. Takes a while to get back.
Same with twitter.
grues-dinner · 15m ago
I'm getting videos with under 10 views in my recommendations now. They're AI generated "educational" videos, but sound like interesting documentaries. Considering how many users YouTube had the chances that I could be in the first 10 viewers for a listed video are tiny unless I personally know the creator or the place is absolutely flooded in AI shit and there is O(users/10) of these videos being uploaded regularly.
bachmeier · 45m ago
Maybe views are simply down. I can't be the only one getting tired of the out-of-control sponsored videos. Even if you pay for YT Premium, you get hit with that crap on most of the popular channels.
meatmanek · 41m ago
And you think everyone simply made the same decision as you on the same exact day?
bachmeier · 27m ago
It's possible that the YTers complaining about this are affected once you bring the algorithm into it.
SoftTalker · 19m ago
Anecdotally I am watching less. Not because of sponsorships, but because more and more content is AI-generated slop or copied (stolen) from other channels and reposted.
pier25 · 14m ago
Anecdotal but my usage has been slowly dropping in the past year or two as the experience has gotten worse. First it was the terrible search results and then with shorts plaguing the whole thing.
Interesting, I thought it was due to absolutely horrible TV UI redesign which now shows exactly 1 and a bit of a video thumbnail on my 77" TV. Who the heck designs that.
MarkusQ · 52m ago
It could be the causality runs the other direction; I know that my youtube viewing is way down since they decided that they could decide what software I may/may not run on my computer.
pndy · 42m ago
On your computer? Could you elaborate?
MarkusQ · 35m ago
They told me I couldn't run ad blocker/anti-virus software on my computer while watching their videos. So I stopped watching their videos. (Technically, the videos aren't theirs, but belong to the creators. Many of them provide the same (or better) content on other platforms),
aszantu · 46m ago
Pretty sure it's caused by the algorithm not serving the user anymore... Unless I block a channel forever I only get served the same channels over and over or it's an endless reel of ai slop with that dead crappy voice on all kinds of variations...
jlarocco · 31m ago
Yeah, these companies are pushing AI so hard they don't see it's destroying the value they had. I don't want to watch an AI reading Wikipedia, showing stock photography, and I doubt anybody else does, either.
I too have noticed a lot more slop in my feed the last several months, and generally have to explicitly check my subscriptions to be sure I don't miss videos.
And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.
That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.
I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.
So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.
squigz · 57m ago
Is there any hard, reliable data on how much money is "lost" by users with ad blockers? Some of the measures Google has taken with regards to ad blockers seem wholly disproportionate to my own impression of how common they really are.
suby · 47m ago
Well, if the recent drop in views was due to adblockers, we now have some data about what percent of viewers block ads. There would have to be an effort to collect this data, and the view discrepncy is probably going to differ by genre of video (eg, tech youtubers probably experienced a greater dip), but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.
Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.
tcfhgj · 43m ago
> but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.
not really, because watching videos without ad blockers would be quite painful
suby · 20m ago
Well, I meant how much is lost financially. Ah, unless you mean that people would watch less videos if they were subjected to ads, which is a great point I didn't consider. You're right, you can't just linearly extrapolate as I suggested due to that.
fishgoesblub · 52m ago
I have no actual hard stats to back this up sadly, but from what I've read ad rates are the same, but the views are down. Presumably because everyone who is using an AdBlock isn't counted as a view, and they obviously don't watch ads so the rates are the same.
jdiff · 53m ago
If this is what they're doing, then it would seem to be negligible. The channels I've heard talking about this don't seem to be taking home any less money despite tanking viewcounts. Earnings are constant, but the numbers supporting those earnings have shuffled around unpredictably. When it's your income, you really don't like things to be shuffling around without warning.
MarkusQ · 50m ago
If you don't like random/inexplicable changes in your income, you probably shouldn't have youtube involved.
bee_rider · 22m ago
I wonder if they want to occasionally agitate against ad blocking just to keep the pressure on.
If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.
SoftTalker · 15m ago
If Apple were to include an ad blocker by default in Safari it would be the greatest thing they've done for users in the past 5 years. Their privacy/anti-tracking stuff is good but it's largely invisible to the end user. People would never want to go back to the raw internet once they experience it without ads.
bee_rider · 7m ago
Yeah. And, “privacy” is part of their pitch (it’s just a sales pitch, not a moral philosophy, and I’m aware that they don’t always live up to it). Including a default-on ad blocker would be an extremely user-visible way of emphasizing that pitch.
tene80i · 51m ago
It will be a low percentage, but a low percentage at youtube's scale is still a vast amount of money and worth going after.
metalman · 43m ago
My bill for access to phone and internet where all data is celular, runs $3000~6000/yr,and includes a domain and email, I refuse to watch any adds ever or pay for anything else that is not property that can be re sold, rented, insured, transfered, or returned cause it's junk, or I dont like it.
I pay my fucking rent, have payed for a long time, and know that there is another way that everything can be configured that sends the "platforms" packing.
The difference is a world where everyone self manages there affairs, does there best, can work and contribute, while living there best lives, or the nasty shit show we have now with a tiny minority attempting to puppet the whole world and everything in it.
faangguyindia · 38m ago
i used to watch lots of videos, but since LLM came into being i find them much faster than watching videos.
Infact, i used to watch videos because they used to be more "targeted" at problem solving when i ran into any issues.
but these days LLM ftw.
the_af · 29m ago
How are LLMs an alternative to videos? They are different mediums.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/digging-deeper-youtub...
I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.
Except viewer counts are a factor for baked in ads. In this case, all the sleuthing and videos about the change are the probably the only thing that will alleviate/lessen the seemingly-worse ad rate negotiation position youtubers with less viewers suddenly find themselves in.
The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.
Wouldn't surprise me if we now see a new trend of "click like, bell, and suscribe and don't forget to disable your ad blocker!".
Obviously they don't care about these views since they are not generating ad revenue. Youtubers who use view counts for sponsor deals etc do care though.
If the answer to both is no, maybe Google's intentionally punishing creators whose viewers use adblockers. But if the goal is to force creators to ask their viewers to stop using adblockers, then why would they not also just admit that they're doing this rather than leaving it up to speculation?
Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing" but they know it won't work if people see them as the source of the message. They want video makers to internalize their message, do what the boss wants on their own initiative, so Google only want to drop hints.
Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.
The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.
It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.
Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.
Even if you earn money from ads, view count is only a proxy at best. Youtube seems to track ads seen not view count (payments from youtube have not changed). Other ads track effectiveness of the ad, and viewcount is only a proxy - if youtube changes the count it means that the constant applied to viewcount in the formula changes but otherwise the payment is the same.
Thus if you get significant money from YouTube adds you care about ad blocking. None of the others need to care (they might, but it could go either way how they feel)
I imagine most don't think about ads seriously, they think about youtube and sponsor revenue.
My guess is that yeah, now they're going after people's sponsorship revenue by under-reporting views if their monetized content is being viewed by people with adblockers.
Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?
Mine is just a sewage firehose so yes, I watch less now, and I use NewPipe on mobile to have a chance to see my subscriptions.
No comments yet
I only see my subscriptions, or things directly related to things I've watched and liked. If I remove a disliked video from my watch history, it "mostly" works to tell YouTube I don't want to see it anymore.
I very seldom see crap I really do not want in my YouTube feed/recommendations. All I see are hobby videos and cartoon clips of things I like.
This is totally unlike Facebook (where random garbage recommendations are the norm) or Reddit (which is hit or miss).
And please, let me opt out of Shorts permanently. I keep telling them I don't want shorts but they always come back. I pay for a Premium account, so they should resepect my wishes on this.
Same with twitter.
And lately they're starting to get more malicious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHW24jOYVw
And I'm quite deliberate with avoiding ragebait and slop, and I remove stuff from my watch history if I get duped etc.
That said, I have noticed a trend amongst the creators I've subscribed to that the average video length has gone up. This has been a longer term trend, but many who used to do 30-40 min videos now often to 1-1.5 hr videos.
I've heard YouTube punishes people quitting a video midway, so perhaps there's something going on there too. At least for myself I often have to watch these videos over multiple sessions, and chances are there that I just forget and move on.
So perhaps some compounding factors making things worse.
Creators have stated that while their viewcount is down their ad revenue is not - but a lower viewcount still presumably hurts youtubers for in video sponsorships, and if some genres of video have a higher portion of users with blockers, that probably hurts that entire genre in the algorithm. It sounds like viewcounts are returning back to normal though.
not really, because watching videos without ad blockers would be quite painful
If I were Google I wouldn’t be that worried about, like, Firefox users with ad blocking addons, or pihole users. But I’d be a bit worried that Apple might take a harder stance against ads, in their browser.
Infact, i used to watch videos because they used to be more "targeted" at problem solving when i ran into any issues.
but these days LLM ftw.
What's your use case?