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!
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)
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
[+] [-] kristopolous|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Andrenid|9 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6QG4n3-rKTs
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!
[+] [-] minimaxir|9 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] sien|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slyall|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipTJNNvW-Gw
NSFW (Swearing etc)
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jseliger|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|9 years ago|reply
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. ;)
[+] [-] lkbm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naner|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saurik|9 years ago|reply
"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
[+] [-] ozmbie|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pryelluw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lithos|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wslh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petre|9 years ago|reply
Isn't repetitive behaviour a hint to autism?
[+] [-] jonursenbach|9 years ago|reply
What?
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] epdtry|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otalp|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahdum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikekchar|9 years ago|reply
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").
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cnnsucks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SyneRyder|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cowardlydragon|9 years ago|reply
The worst is when I go to watch a youtube for an ad (a movie trailer) and get ads for that.
[+] [-] Jitle|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
Also, 60 seconds commercials for small videos... bad idea
[+] [-] rajacombinator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohwello|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ygkevin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JBReefer|9 years ago|reply
It seems to be something algorithmic. The linked video is interesting, if YouTube-y.
[+] [-] jmnicolas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] automatwon|9 years ago|reply
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.
- "I'm quitting YouTube"
[+] [-] gameofcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kawera|9 years ago|reply