according to my playlist history, they were already doing that.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Cooking books on a cooking earth.
So every time your mouse activates the thumbnail preview: that's a view.
Don't bother trying to turn that feature off. They just turn it back on. Flipping those fake settings buttons is just more engagement "money" for them to harvest.
On PC you need to turn off view history and use Ublock Origin to block EVERYTHING on YT but the player and some basic UI buttons and maybe comments.
I tried watching a how-to video on YT today.
It say “playback not supported on this device”.
Probably thanks to my ad-blocking efforts.
Fuck youtube. Can’t get views if the video never plays.
Views not high enough? Change the definition of your metrics so it looks like you're getting better results! It's not technically lying to investors.
It’s what everyone else is doing. Gotta compare apples to apples
This is because they just fucked everyone by doubling the minimum views to get paid.
And turned YouTube into even more incentive to generate clickbait.
Revenue is already largely based on watch time, so if people click away after a couple seconds, you didn't really get anything anyway. Plus you tell the algorithm that your videos will cause a room of people to leave quickly
Here is my take - They are adding a new metric called "Engaged Views", this is the same metric that a "View" was previously, something like - the person stayed after 30 seconds so they are "engaged". Then they are going to sell ads based on the now inflated view number and use the "Engaged view" metric against creators so they can cut the amount they are paying for monetization.
Ding ding! Nailed it.
Inflate apparent views across the board while simultaneously making it harder for creators to get paid.
I think what matters for creators is verified watch hours
Well that's a great incentive for clickbait content - cause now it won't matter if you can keep people watching after you've reeled them in.
You'd think this would be against YouTube's own best interest, considering they want to keep you watching, and people don't often like watching that kind of clickbait-farm slop...
Or maybe I and the people I know are in the minority, and a lot of people just watch it whether they like it or not, which would be disappointing to hear.
What the other guy said.
The counter for advertisements are based on the number of views, hence counting a video as soon as its playing as a view, they'll be able to jam in more advertising.
this is definitely against their interests, unless they just plan on having people watch ads everytime they open a video, watch that video for like 1 second and go to next and watch more ads. There is no depth of depravity i wont put past corporation executives, so that feels very plausible how they think and how detached they are from humans.
It could even be prelude to some other even more horrible, like they start gatekeeping actually decent stuff with premium aggressively.
We should really start archiving the good content of youtube more, just in case.. I would too, but i dont have that much extra harddrive space and i dont have energy enough to start learning to build a personal storage system that is secure and fault resistant.
I mostly watch videos from channels I'm already subscribed to, but recently a few shows I watch have dropped new seasons and I was looking for recaps on YouTube. It was nothing but AI slop channel after AI slop channel. I would click off as fast as possible to not give them the view, but I guess they will all count going forward. It really sucks because we can't opt out of these channels and many of them don't even admit to being AI anyway.
I have no idea how this change is good for them. I totally agree that it seems like it'll encourage low quality content. After a few of those videos I can't imagine most people sticking around for another, but what do I know. I'm sure they have more accurate stats than I do.
Didn't see it in the article, but I wonder if on desktop at least will it count if you hover and "preview" the video before clicking on it? Hopefully not, then we can see if it is slop or not, though that will be 1 more annoying thing to do
I'm not super well versed, but my understanding was that watching the preview for more than X seconds already counted as a view. At least it was like that a while back after they were introduced.
Also be careful because these ai channels are sneaky and will use generic pictures or stills but the script and voice are all AI.
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I think it just means that the raw view count was never very important to YouTube. That's why they will have "engaged views" and "qualified watch hours" etc.
For those of us born before YouTube, we can just leave it.
For those born in the last couple decades, legacy tv and movies are difficult to watch and are only consumed occasionally. It will never, ever occur to YouTube's primary audience to stop watching.
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Right after they announced they're doubling the required watch time to turn on monetisation, it's clear what they want - more volume, less quality. Slop, slop, slop.
100%
These changes will cause smaller creators to take more shortcuts, which will mean more use of AI, even if they're not using it to generate the video itself.
As a creator myself, I don't know what purpose this metric really serves in the end. I guess a one-second view tells me if a thumbnail image was effective, but apart from that, it's just useless.
I'm hoping this actually leads to less AI slop.
I've clicked off of so many videos after a second or two once I realized they were just AI narrated garbage.
I now use the right click "open in new tab" on any video so if it is AI, I can close the tab then hit the list where the video was and then go to the action dots to the right of it and "do not recommend" the channel. Have managed to give most of the godawful HFY videos the slip (..though recently new AI channels have popped up in my feed.. Urgh..)
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So after butchering the like/dislike ratio, the view-count will also become utterly useless... What's next, automatically subscribing users to inflate subscriber-count too? All these universally liked videos (no dislikes), views/exposure (zero engagement), advertiser-friendly content (threatened (shadow)banning or demonetization)! Now the only red flag to any malinformed advertiser might be a low subscriber-count; so just do it already. Well, alongside the lackluster performance of the ads themselves of course (which can only be measured after the transaction: poorly at that). And the best part: non of the ad-revenue will be shared with the propped up channels: as the recently heightened threshold, requires additional engaged viewers; as opposed to the TikTok-level, worthless kind.
I assumed they were already doing that. They've never been forthcoming in regards to what actually counts as a view.
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Especially weird if I view videos from my own channel, on my end it seems to tally each time I watch my own videos, which isn't supposed to happen.
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And videos I never chose or clicked on automatically start playing as soon as I open the app or switch from "Me" to "Home."
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Or if one person watches a video multiple times, does youtube count each of those views? Because for YouTubers whose livelihood depends on likes & views & subscribers, YouTube needs to make sure a creator isn't manipulating the system with bot farms or friends/family/paid losers to repeatedly watch the videos.
Now my brain hurts & I'm grumpy. Bye.
Turn off auto play. Shit's annoying anyway.
Yes my autoplay is always turned off. I mean when you're on the home screen it automatically plays, on mute, and not full-screen, whichever suggested video is oriented in the middle of the screen. This isn't something that can be opted out of.
Also accidental hovering seems to count in my history like 50% of the time
Yes that's exactly what I mean. It's disingenuous for YouTube to be doing that, I mean in the grand scheme of things it's a trifling matter, but it's a bit of fuckery because algorithms & livelihoods are affected by this nonsense.
Now we have view inflation on top of losing the dislike button and the UI consistently getting worse.
Fyi the return youtube dislike works wonders. They store the dislikes instead of youtube and adjust them to match the view count.
Don't forgrt it just autoplays shit too.
Calling it now..
"YouTube will now count views only when an ad has been played in full".
Will come sooner than you think.
They already do that, sort of. The last I heard, people watching with an ad-blocker also blocked the mechanism that incremented the watch counter. This may or may not have been deliberate. The interesting thing is that the video appears in people's Watch History ad-blocker or not, so there was always an easy fix sitting in plain sight.
They told creators about the watch count problem along with at least one other secret thing that they said they weren't allowed to talk about. Charlie / Cr1TiKaL / penguinz0 said as much as he could about it a few months back.
I think the secret thing was probably "we're working on a way to get those view counts back, but don't tell anyone because we want to discourage people from using ad-blockers and if you tell them they're costing people views, it might convince them to turn it off."
Assuming true, that's all now out of the window because they've "fixed" the problem.
I expect another fierce attack on ad-blockers in Q4.
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When I was a kid I would refresh my video to increase the view count. I thought this was implemented to prevent that.
That's it, I'm in my grandpa era, books (published pre-2022) and retro games only
If I could browse the internet at large with the same filter (that is to say only content pre-2022) I might consider still using it but as of right now it ain't worth it. Might just build a zeronet with my friends at this point.
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Rewarding clickbait, let’s goo
These changes, awful as they seem, are effecting me less and less as I use the platform less and less. It's like, "oh you're getting worse? Carry on then", then I go back to my Plex server.
s/Plex/Jellyfin/
Sounds like a desperate attempt to convince investors that there is growing user engagement by decreasing the amount of time needed for a video to be considered engaging. Must be that people are moving through shorts at breakneck speeds. I haven’t touched YouTube in many years as the platform turned into one giant ad service (even if you pay for to remove ads). I guess that is what Google is primarily anyway, a company aiming to serve personalized (maybe also behavioral) ad to people.
Oh like the chinese bot farms aren't going to take advantage of this to push slop content to the top. Wonder what they are charging for 1 sec views...
Who cares? I'm not even sure my NewPipe displays these numbers.
It makes it easier for advertisers because all views on the internet are equally inflated I guess but it also destroys 2 decades of internet history in that views played a huge role in Youtube culture and they will soon become meaningless with this update. Getting a million or a billion views on anything won‘t matter at all anymore.
But yeah Facebook, Xitter and TikTok have been doing it for years so it makes sense when you compete with them.
SEO pivotting to video i see
Ok. Who cares?
Man I miss the early days of the Internet with the bullshit hit counters that were completely inconsequential when wrong and anyone could game.
Now somehow cuz it's big business, those same bullshit hit counters can be used to move big mountains of money.
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