YouTube changed what a view is

YouTube now counts statistics differently for longer videos.

Before, a regular view was shrouded in mystery — some said it required more than a minute of watching, others said seven seconds. But it was clear that it wasn’t just any press of the play button. YouTube kept this metric secret.

Now, starting from late August, any instance of playing a video will count as a view (autoplay from the feed seems to be an exception). What used to count as views has now become “engaged views” buried in analytics (still with no explanation of how it’s calculated).

As a result, view counts on new videos have grown by 2–3x. And the larger the channel, the bigger the gap between the view counter and engaged views. The latest episode of “Baka!”, for example, shows 63k views but only 21k engaged views.

YouTube clearly benefits from this — if TikTok and Instagram can count anything and everything as views, YouTube doesn’t want to fall behind. Otherwise their numbers would look less attractive to advertisers and investors.

Potentially this works in creators’ favor too — not every advertiser, let alone agency, will bother digging into all of this. Which means ad space can be sold at a higher price.

On the other hand, inflating your view count has become even easier, public counters will ultimately be trusted less — and analyzing channel popularity, trends, and finding great creators will only get harder.

What do you think about this decision?