youtube's recent changes

I've been using YouTube a long time. How long? See the image. That long. That's a partial screenshot of what I see right now when I'm in YouTube Studio.

Yes, I remember the days from oh-so long ago when YouTube was independent and not owned by Google, had 1-to-5 "star" ratings for videos, direct messaging, the video description being on the right instead of below, only having 4:3 video format support, YouTube Groups... and heck, I even remember when a 10 minute time limit was imposed on uploaded videos unless you had a "Director" account.

I also remember the changes to how video views were counted. Originally, it was open season, and people that knew how cheated their way to "front page". I was not one of those people. YouTube obviously changed things so people couldn't do that, but over the years the way video views were counted changed several times.

Ultimately, what YouTube decided to do that stuck around for a while was a 30-second watch time requirement. If anyone viewing a video didn't stick around for at least 30 seconds, the view wasn't counted.

A month ago, that changed, and now a view is registered as soon as the first frame of the video is loaded.

In YouTube Studio, plenty of notice was given before this change was made, so it didn't end up surprising content creators, which was good.

Why the change? Answer: A new metric called Engaged Views, which is different from Views. For example, I have a video with 1.3K views, but the Engaged Views is under 400.

Did this change affect earnings for those with monetized channels? That I don't know. Too soon to tell. But I would think it's the Engaged Views that actually matter more to content creators now, because if Views are high but Engaged Views is low, that probably affects monetization... maybe? Again, too early to know for sure.

I do have one complaint, but it's a small one. Engaged Views is probably what matters more than Views. That being the case, when in YouTube Studio and you click Content and see your list of videos, the default view count column is still Views. That default should be changed to Engaged Views since it's the more important number. Like I said, small complaint. But since YouTube is really pushing this metric as the one to pay attention to, that should be the default view count column in the YouTube Studio Content area.

Or what would be even better is a hybrid column. Views/Engaged Views. If a video has 1,000 Views and 250 Engaged Views, then in the Content area the column shows as 1,000/250. That would be nice.

Something else caught my attention, and that's video ratings.

I mentioned the old school 1-to-5 star ratings above. YouTube ditched that years ago for like/dislike. When they first did this, there was a two-color bar below every video. Green for like, red for dislike. The colors were later changed, but I don't remember exactly to what. I think it was red/gray instead of green/red. Later on, the bar was removed entirely and only showed a thumb-up with the like number and a thumb-down icon with the dislike number. After that, it changed again to a thumb-up icon with the like count number, but no number next to thumb-down. And that's where we are now.

More interesting to me concerning video ratings is what happened in YouTube Studio on the desktop end. On the Content sidebar selection, the columns shown no longer include ratings. Are the ratings still there? Yes, but you have to load up the Analytics for a video, then click the Engagement tab, and then "Likes (vs. dislikes)" is seen. However, getting the dislikes count takes more effort. Under Likes (vs. dislikes), "See more" has to be clicked, then under Metrics on the left, Dislikes has to be checked, Likes unchecked, Likes (vs. dislikes) unchecked, then the dislikes count can be seen for the given date range.

I'm actually not complaining about this because the data is still there. It may take more clicks to get the number, but I still have access to it.

It is curious that video ratings almost don't matter at this point. Almost. Yeah, they still count as engagement, so I assume that's why ratings still exists. However, YouTube is really putting forward the message that it's the engagement that counts the most, ratings now is just a small part of that, and it's really not necessary to be seeing ratings in the default Content list view.

I think I actually agree with this, save for the fact Engaged Views takes an extra click. YouTube should do the hybrid column thing like I mentioned above.

Why do I agree? Less distraction. On one of my more recent videos, there was a dislike rating on there and I didn't even know about it. When I thought about that, I came to the conclusion of yeah, better to not see that in the default Content list view.

Seeing a dislike rating, even if just one out of a thousand, can affect how a content creator does things. It is altogether better to make it slightly more difficult to get that ratings info, because there's absolutely nobody that can get 100% likes on every single video they post.