I've strongly believed for a while that a very large percentage of youtube views are children, say under the age of 6.
I've observed children on tablets ... they will watch the same video north of 100 times ... it's what kids do.
Then you look at the successful youtubers; people who do things like unwrap gifts or who make things I perplexingly am not entertained by. When I put it in the context of "this is watched by 5 year olds" everything makes sense.
I was talking to someone at a company that tracks these things, she said "no, it's actually women in their late 30s and 40s". This is even more evidence. They are on their mothers devices. It's not like women in their 40s are watching 60 variations of '5 little monkeys jumping on the bed'.
I'm waiting for the commercials to be kids cereal and action figures, but somehow that hasn't happened yet. I get a Capital One credit card ad, logged out, in private mode, watching a nursery rhyme video. (hint hint, million dollar business right there).
They regularly have a half billion views, and are literally just someone opening Kinder Surprise toys and playing with them.
I have no idea why she loves them, but she just stays captivated until we put her back to Playschool.
For reference, she's never seen a Kinder Surprise in her life, or seen Frozen (or any Disney movie), or anything that would explain her draw to these videos.
As for the videos she does watch, at 1.5yrs old she already knew how to pick a new Related Video, or drag the slider back to rewatch a video, and will happily watch the same Playschool episode or Peppa Pig clip non stop for hours if we let her.
This new generation who have never known anything other than internet connected touch screens is truly fascinating to watch. Using tablets and phones is as natural as walking or playing.
I am getting sick of cleaning the TV though, since we can't manage to teach her that it's not touch screen!
It is near-majority user input error, wow (sort by date, top comment sorting is disingenuous). I've argued for bayesian analysis of advertisement CTR and user-error for years, but this is beyond any model that I argue for.
On my tablets it looks like you have to swipe the related videos to the bottom then you have a comment section. So it's in the right area for how kids navigate youtube.
Image of the comment section. That's fascinating, I never realized websites like youtube were being used so extensively by younger generations. Really makes me feel old and I'm college aged.
My daughter does the same. And I'm glad because she also likes my little ponies, and for some reason there are a lot of adult my little pony spinoff videos. I saw her watching one where the ponies were making out (restricted mode on). So opening gift videos are awesome!
First time I showed my daughter something on my phone she immediately zoomed out. Someone else had showed her how to manipulate a touch screen, but it was pretty striking to see a toddler adeptly use a phone. This was a few years ago now.
I found out that the most-viewed Gaming video...is a random video of the game-of-the-movie Cars 2, due to kid viewership alone. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urHuO7Zbhhw)
(I'd love to look at YouTube data again in light of the recent controversies, but it appears the API limitations have not changed since, which makes data scraping again a major hassle)
I think that there's another element to some of the automated content channels like "Toys in Japan". They make content based on comments on other videos, was hacked according to Goodwin's Law. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OoU2ck2RiY)
My pet theory is that these channels are monetized for automated click farms and they use children's content partly because kids will watch it, obfuscating the bot-clicks, and more-so that they can increase the safe threshold of bot-clicks/bot-views since children's viewing habits are to watch the same video repeatedly.
For anyone with a small child who watches Lego videos this is undoubtedly true.
Indeed, it's worth having a poke around on youtube to have a look at the numbers on speed Lego builds and on little Lego animations.
It's a lot better than a most of the insipid, overly-twee bilge that is a lot of TV targeted at kids though.
Hopefully it can also lead into watching the amazing how to videos on youtube on almost everything from drawing, to fixing bikes to fiddling with Raspberry Pis though.
This guy (h3h3) is claiming that a grownup "Prankster" Youtube channel switched to making "Spiderman and Elsa" videos for kids and made so much money in a few months the blew it all on $100k sports cars
Isn't google not supposed to be tracking 5 year olds?
Seems weird that Google wouldn't figure out something so obvious... unless it were in their interest not to do so.
Kids are definitely able to navigate YouTube at young ages. My son at three could navigate to just about any arbitrary kid topic from any starting point. He could start from Daniel Tiger to 1980 Spider-Man to some weird Korean show with talking busses by surfing the recommendations.
Put your tinfoil caps on. I personally think Google knows this fact but has monetary reasons to not disclose it. If the advertising industry expected to pay say, 4 times as much when they advertise to children, Google would be all over that.
Also, whatever your CTR is, it becomes a lot less meaningful if it turns out the majority of your users are illiterate and between the ages of 1 and 4.
I guess the money making scheme/scam here would be an advertising firm where you make commercials that incentivize viewers to put their finger on the video during the ad and appeal to toddlers.
An ad like "Put your finger on my face! Owww!" may deliver obscene "convergence" numbers. So long as the clients don't figure out the demographic of their viewers, you get the big bucks.
I teach undergrads and some, maybe even many, are "into" famous Youtubers, and many will apparently just... watch YouTube videos. As a sort of primary activity.
To me this seems bizarre, or maybe friends around my age are doing this and not talking about it—but lots of people around my age use a lot of Facebook, which I also find to be a waste of time and counter-stimulating.
Well, it's not really something I consider as my primary activity, but I do like to spend an hour or two on it every second day.
It's a simple way to learn something new without the need of getting too involved with the material.
(For example, Geography Now! [0]has taught me a lot of things about other countries that I would never know about and it only requires like 15 minutes of my effort once per week.)
I consider it a nice way to lose some time when I'm not trying to focus on something.
On the other hand, I haven't watched a movie in months.
Unfortunately, YouTube's recommendations really don't do a lot in helping me discovering new things. I find myself putting in a lot more effort in finding what I would actually enjoy than I would have hoped to have with everything Google knows about me.
> On the other hand, I haven't watched a movie in months.
While reading many of the comments on this thread I had trouble comprehending how anyone could spend so much time watching videos on YouTube. This aside made me realize that I probably spend five or six hours per week watching movies/tv shows. Pretty much the same thing.
Before YouTube, they might have watched TV instead, with the added complication that TV isn't on-demand and is missing entire categories of content you can get on YouTube (or other online sources). Same thing more or less.
I strongly prefer youtube to facebook because youtube doesn't require active use of my hands so I can do the dishes or clean my flat while learning about the history of iron[1].
I recently started "watching YouTube" as an alternative to channel surfing on TV.
I don't appreciate most of the YouTube personalities so it can sometimes be difficult to find good stuff, but then again I don't appreciate most television programming either. But I've realized that there is value in low-brow entertainment and not every single thing you watch has to be a great production with depth.
i watch a lot of niche hobby channels (not gaming) on youtube as a primary activity. there is some very, very good content out there. many shows get made that would never pass muster at a "tv network".
these people are able to make enough from youtube to either supplement a good professional income, or replace it altogether. which makes everyone, both producer and viewer, very happy indeed.
Concerns me that the person doing that job couldn't connect the dots of kids using parent's devices.
What I see is an industry of independent content developers who have gotten very close to the simplest form possible of "push button, receive dopamine."
As an upcoming parent, I feel I just need to not overreact and be moderate. Like TV in the 1900s, I just need to not rely on YouTube to babysit my kids.
Also, maybe they're advertising a credit card to the parent or guardian that's nearby. ;)
> As an upcoming parent, I feel I just need to not overreact and be moderate. Like TV in the 1900s, I just need to not rely on YouTube to babysit my kids.
But more likely you are just going to do it wrong and your children will resent you for it and pledge they'll react better to the unforeseen challenges they will have raising their own children
We're a civilization of drug addicts, addicted to that hit of chemicals -- we as a species have always been like this, but the environment that we have created for ourselves is not engineered properly in that it does not regulated that hit properly. Good parenting is not going to fix that, it might delay it. But kids grow up and then they buy and do whatever they want, learning self-regulation is difficult if not impossible in the candyland our desires have created.
VanDeGraph has an interesting video basically agreeing with this: infants with iPads are watching toy videos and clicking randomly for hours on end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0Q5jO8I59w
This seems correct to me, I've watched my niece since she was two (she's 4 now) navigating YouTube on her mom's phone or tablet. She watches mostly kids playing with toys and the adults in costume nonsense videos mentioned below. All the vids she watches are made for YouTube (e.g. not casual one time uploads) and everything I've seen her watch has over a million views. YouTube's recommend feature let's her bounce from video to video endlessly. Also this easily allows for copycats. There a ton of channels that do the adults in costume nonsense videos now and they all have huge amounts of traffic.
"To learn the moves, I watch the videos over and over and over... I've probably watched like, millions..." -- 12-year old girl learning to dance to dub step
One reason why putting those video ads in mobile games has proven so successful, is that kids will watch them non-stop in order to farm small amounts of in-game currency. After all, they can't make in app purchases without an adult's permission.
There's a lot of money to be made in having children watch hundreds of ads for that fraction-of-a-cent per view revenue.
YouTube is similar to MTV in the 80s in terms of appeal and sophistication. Thats why anybody who is big there will not be considered a "real" celeb by people who dont have a clue. But dont be surprised when you see the channel DisneyCarToys advertising the new Disney movie (they already do). The amount of influence these channels have is inmense. Most people dont get it (including so called smart business people). Media as we know it will not exist in 5 years.
That was formalized at Nickolodian after Blues Clues had to play the same episode multiple times in the week, mostly by accident since the show was more expensive than normal. It surprised everyone up and down the decision and production chain, especially since they were expecting failure due to lack of novelty.
It's not really women who are watching the videos, it's the kids. But the "views" show up on the accounts of the women who load up the video for their kids.
Well, the four-year-old didn't go out and buy a tablet or phone for themselves. They're watching videos on Moms device, while she's signed in to her Google account, hence all that activity shows up in the "Women 30-40" bucket.
My first response to a statement like "youtube views are down across the board" is that Google is being more effective at catching ad fraud. Just recently we had the "$5M a day ad fraud story" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219871) on video ad fraud.
Ad fraud is prevalent because it is the perfect "victimless" crime. If you build a system that defrauds advertisers the ad platform won't prosecute you because they don't want to admit to the fraud, they will just figure out how to detect and block you. They might try to take back money but there are lots of ways to move money through the banking system so that you get to keep most (if not all) of it. There are billions of dollars in play so stealing .01% is profitable and essentially "noise" to the players. And everything is already set up to automatically send money around so you never have to meet face to face. As one person put it, "It's a giant money of river flowing right by your doorstep, you're telling me you won't step out and dip your cup into it now and then to pick up some walking around money?"
The effect of Google being more effective was they massively suppressed the ad revenue from things like AdSense for content which both made legitimate small scale sites no longer even making beer money, and the required infrastructure to defraud AdSense a bit more expensive.
YouTube has been trying to get profitable for years, and they are trying to get more advertisers on it, and it has a huge click/view fraud problem (as evidenced by the Forbes article and elsewhere). So if they clean it of viewbots then views will likely "go down across the board."
Title is misleading. Views are down for the 49 "YouTube personalities" with >10 million subscribers. Views may well be increasing for other categories, such as smaller channels or channels run by television studios.
Yeah, this changes everything about what the title seemed to imply.
I think it's a case of people becoming tired with the same stuff that's churned out by those YouTube personalities with >10 mil subscribers. Once you reach that level you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and once you do that you're competing with a host of fresher channels with newer ideas.
This did happen. Previously, "Recommended" was primarily your subscriptions and you got notifications when someone you follow posted. Now recommendations are mostly channels you are not subscribed to, and you need to "double subscribe" by pushing the bell icon on the side of the subscription button to get those notifications.
Also this year they started quietly "demonetizing" videos that had bad words/topics or were not advertiser friendly, so some YouTubers pivoted to inane child content. I am pretty sure these demonetizing videos get particularly burried by the Algo.
In order to watch videos from creators you subscribe to you need to ... view your SUBSCRIPTION page. But people are mostly brainless sheep clicking randomly on the shiny, and "subscribing" to them mean liking something double plus good.
What all the 10m sub assholes are crying about is Google no longer pushing their shit into peoples recommendations. Thats what Subscription is for, why recommend something you already subscribed to?
"Recommended" and "Trending" are pretty much useless for me. The "Up next" thing works well for episodic videos, but otherwise, meh.
Finding relevant stuff is actually really hard. The best way to find new stuff is when a channel recommends another. And that does scale, but isn't immediate. So I see the point of algorithms, but don't rely on them or force them on me.
Maybe because they started prepending 1 minute-long ad spots before videos are played, and people click away. Personally, I'm willing to tolerate 15 seconds, maybe 30 on something I really want to see.
I just started making a few YouTube videos. I have very few viewers and I haven't advertised at all. This lets me see how the numbers add up. For one thing, it is obvious that they don't add up properly.
I live in Japan and after I upload a video I watch it once -- all the way through, just to make sure there was nothing strange happening when it gets re-encoded. I will go back to the video to respond to comments (err... one or two comments).
My brother was in Saudi Arabia. He was nice enough to watch my videos. Once each, all the way through. He never sent any comments.
Result: 39 views in Japan and 35 views in Saudi Arabia. I can say with almost no uncertainty that these numbers are incorrect. I don't have any other viewers in SE asia or middle eastern countries. Whatever is happening, these are not normal views.
If YouTube are improving this situation, then that's good. But I have almost no faith in their analytics.
Edit: Is Google reading??? Just checked again and now I have 27 views from Japan and 4 from Saudi -- which is probably about right (if you consider that every time I respond to a comment it counts as a "view").
Everyone who's suggesting it's due to insert-pet-peeve-here (content fatigue, quality, ads, facebook) is missing the fact that this happened pretty much overnight. It's definitely a recommendation algorithm change (or as someone suggested, clickfraud fixes).
Ads, but also content / recommendations. I signed up for YouTube Red to finally get rid of ads & support the few channels I subscribe to, but instead it started promoting YouTube Originals that insult my intelligence. (I'm really, really not interested in Scare PewDiePie, or Prank Academy, or Foursome.)
YouTube keeps shoving recommendations on me that I'm just not interested in. I'm more likely to start at Netflix first now (no ads, better quality), or even Vimeo (which has tons of really good conference videos that aren't on YouTube). I do miss watching TechMoan on YT, though.
I'm with you there. I have YouTube Red because it's included with Google music.
The absolute garbage that they have in YouTube Red is so prominently forced on top of everything else. Things that I'm sure they have the data to prove I'm not interested in.
What shocked me the most about it is that it seems that's the kind of content that gets big on YouTube. Which is fine, I don't mind them subsidizing YouTube with that. But it is annoying for them to try to force that and prioritize it over my subscriptions. So much so that it has turned me off some from YouTube. Thing is, they probably don't mind, I don't think I make them any money, I'm not the audience they want.
I also thought these were all pretty dumb, but clicked the X button and haven't even thought about them in several months. I am kind of annoyed by unrelated recommendations though; I watch a video where someone is making tools for his lathe, then the recommendation is "MAN GETS STUNG BY BULLET ANT OH GOD THE PAIN 30 MINUTES OF HIS HAND SWELLING UP AND THEN BEING RUSHED TO THE HOSPITAL AND THEN HE DIES OR SOMETHING MAYBE NOT YOU CAN'T FLAG TITLES FOR BEING MISLEADING SO HAH". Not interested, at all, seriously.
Some of my recommendations I blame on clicking on things that are popular on Reddit. Pushes me back towards the lowest common denominator. (I'm not averse to watching some car crashes.)
I'm not sure how refusing to watch Techmoan because of dismissable recommendations accomplishes anything, though. Bookmark his channel, pick the video you haven't seen, watch, close tab :)
I wondered what you meant about dismissible recommendations and the X button... then I realised that isn't an option in the YouTube smart TV app, at least not that I can see. Much of my YouTube watching (especially while subscribed to YouTube Red) was happening on my TV through the Smart TV interface, not the web browser or phone apps.
I have Youtube Red and regularly watch Youtube videos. But I've never even heard of Scare PewDiePie or Foursome, and have never seen Youtube recommend Prank Academy.
These are indeed the worst. What I don't get is the nature of the relationships such that studios don't seem to promote their own trailers.
The only things that show up are those crappy trailer aggregators that, to your point, cause you to watch an ad to see an ad. These days I tend to start with Apple's Trailers app. Brief synopsis and a list of all the trailers in HD--is that too hard for YouTube?
The studios are very strange sometimes. Dumb stuff I've seen them do recently:
* Post to obscure channels
* Have cross-promotional stuff on the trailers
* Region blocked videos
* Take down official trailers after a while
* Give exclusive trailers to sites
* Only post the trailers to yahoo or some other less-popular site and skip youtube.
Thus often the most reliable way to get the trailers is via MovieClips or one of the other channels, who all put their junk and ads on them.
Source: I have a little hobby of finding trailers to post to /r/trailers ( https://www.reddit.com/r/trailers/ ) on Reddit. Would recommend if you are into trailers, the mods there prioritize official sources and weed out most of the dups and bads ones.
Previously, more users would embed youtube videos within facebook and obviously those would count as youtube views. Now facebook has pushed their own videos like crazy taking away tons of yt views.
Second, a lot of the young youtube watchers that would stay there for hours are now hooked on snapchat or various other video specific apps to fill that video content demand.
And it's not just frequent ads. I've seen bizarrely long ads recently - 10 minute ad on a 22 minute video.
There are some ads that I just really fucking hate, and it would be good if YT gave me the chance to block obnoxious ads. A recent set of car ads had a startle noise blare in the 5 second forced watch, so I spent a couple of weeks using youtube-dl to avoid ads.
If you make your living from ads you don't want people like me to switch because I'm mostly ad tolerant.
> I've seen bizarrely long ads recently - 10 minute ad on a 22 minute video.
YouTube advertisers expect people to skip ads.
You can sort of think of all ad content on a skippable-after-5s ad as a request by the advertiser to "watch as much or as little of this as you want", rather than a request to "watch all of this."
You see in in movie trailers. The trailer will typically have a cold-opening and sometimes a "mini-trailer" before the movie title that last almost exactly 5 seconds. This is to at least expose you to the movie even if you don't watch the rest.
I don't mind the ads but I hate the delay to dismiss. I actually enjoy watching relevant or non traditional ads, seen some great ones lately from other YouTube channels advertising. But my ability to decide if an ad is relevant is way faster than 5 seconds. It wastes everyone's time and money by making me wait longer.
But the article is talking about the top 49 non-music channels (so Vevo is excluded). I would agree with you - my behavior has shifted from Youtube to Spotify - but this is channels like PewDePie losing views.
It seems to be something algorithmic. The linked video is interesting, if YouTube-y.
I significantly reduced watching Youtube after the Youtube channels I watched started optimizing for revenue.
I gravitated to YouTube in the beginning because it felt disestablishment, and less commercialized. Now, it is the establishment. I don't know much about Youtube's payment / incentivization structure, but from the outside, I see YouTubers valuing quantity / frequency over "quality" and things that are not necessarily profit maximizing.
For example, there is one channel that originally produced funny skits. Now, they just talk about "news" and current events. Each of their video nowadays gets less views, but they're able to release more videos because it requires less planning, filming, post-production. They claimed they were producing the news videos as a stopgap to free up time to work on their feature film. 2-3 years later, they've made no progress. Their fanbase complained in the comment section as this happened, and their videos suffered a higher amount of dislikes than likes, in the beginning. Now, their news videos have bounced back to a high high like-dislike ratio. I don't think it's because these news videos inherently got better. I think they've successfully "pivoted" to this content category, attracting the right audience while their original fanbase, myself included, stopped caring enough to go dislike the video.
I see this trend with the majority of channels I watch, too. Here are some examples of "fluff" content to gain views:
- stretching out a simple topic into an unnecessarily long video
- providing a "novel" / hipster / contrarian opinion on something already well covered for the sake of being different
- An unboxing channel that goes from unboxing things people want, to things that are just ludicrous
- Covering a topic subscribers wouldn't otherwise care about. Take my brother for example, whose Youtube channel has 10 million+ views. His channel was originally teaching people English, then he started making VLOGs about aspects of American society such as going to the DMV or buying a used car, and recently he made a video about Gingerbread houses. As someone who traverses Wikipedia, I still think the audience interested in learning English have many other things they find more entertaining than the history of Gingerbread.
Average views per channel (with >10m subs) might be down, but that doesn't mean total viewing time on YouTube is down across the board. Views might be spread out over different channels (This data only represented changes in 49).
I've observed children on tablets ... they will watch the same video north of 100 times ... it's what kids do.
Then you look at the successful youtubers; people who do things like unwrap gifts or who make things I perplexingly am not entertained by. When I put it in the context of "this is watched by 5 year olds" everything makes sense.
I was talking to someone at a company that tracks these things, she said "no, it's actually women in their late 30s and 40s". This is even more evidence. They are on their mothers devices. It's not like women in their 40s are watching 60 variations of '5 little monkeys jumping on the bed'.
Multiple variations of this nursery rhyme have viewcounts over 100 million. (https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=CAM%253D&q=monkeys+on+the...).
I'm waiting for the commercials to be kids cereal and action figures, but somehow that hasn't happened yet. I get a Capital One credit card ad, logged out, in private mode, watching a nursery rhyme video. (hint hint, million dollar business right there).