YouTube shorts have been crazy and I'm not sure if its real.

Back in march. YouTube announced they would be changing how shorts views are calculated. When shorts first began to infect YouTube as a platform. They calculated views based on an initial percentage viewed.

Now YouTube has changed the whole system. Views are now calculated based on plays and replays. Meaning views for short are going to skyrocket. Let me show you some examples.

These screenshots are from before the change. On the left it shows 13k engaged viewers. While on the right it shows 13.4 "Views"

This is a short that was uploaded after the change.

As you can see from the two shorts uploaded after this change. Revenue is still based on the same metric as before. "Engaged views" However because all plays are counted as views the overall number is way higher.

This concerns me, it makes me flash back to the time where Facebook was boasting the highest numbers on their videos when compared to any other social media platform. Causing many platforms to "Pivot to video" back in 2015. In reality Facebook was inflating their views by counting page views as a view of the video. Regardless of if the user was simply scrolling past. Thankfully in this case the real numbers are being surfaced. In some ways YouTube is still showing us the real numbers and simply hiding them from the public. Then showing inflated numbers to the audience for no real reason.

I assume plenty of people reading this remembers when you could simply refresh a YouTube video and increase the view count? This was why videos would get stuck at the fabled 301 views. Because YouTube had to check to make sure someone was not inflating the video manually. Insuring the views were from a real source and not some forum who decided to boost it. While in reality it was probably a little of both the reality of how the video was doing would surface after the 301 view count would fade and the actual number would take its place.

I don't know how Tiktok tracks its views. It is not a platform I've ever held in much of a priority. In fact, I don't even like shorts. I don't like making them or how they are surfaced to the audience. Personally, I feel like they have been forced into my life and I'm frankly not a fan of it. That being said, I make them because I can see the wheels of YouTube's algorithm turning and so I have to make them to participate. In a perfect world I'll hit 100k subscribers on YouTube this year. In order to do that I have to participate. This change just makes them feel less real and reminds me of simpler times when people would just refresh to help their videos take off. I guess that means, let those shorts replay. It'll make the numbers go up.

Schedule

I'm going to stream Tuesday - Thursday this week so I can finish that video next weekend. I've mostly got the full runtime down and most of the voice done. Now I just need to spit shine and polish.

This blog slipped through the cracks these past few weeks but I want to get it back to some level of frequency. These more stats related posts used to be restricted to members only. I honestly need a better thing to do for paying members and I'm going to be trying to figure that out over the next few weeks.

Here are some recent uploads in the meantime. As always, Thanks for the support!