[monkeywork]

Why does anyone not financially motivated care about how many views a video gets? Use the like function if you want I guess .

It makes sense to have the view count only show views that could be useful for ad revenue ... This way you can be honest with advertiser's about roughly how many eyeballs they can expec5

[NonHyloMorph]

If you claim your counting views while simultaneoudly andvwithout disclosure don't count views of people using an adbkocker even so you could then thagvis deceiving. If it was the case I second waht the above poster hinted at: seems like a strategy to manipulate public discourse by using influencers frustration over where it hurts them (their purse) enhanced by the haunting sensation of loosing control (since they cannot know how and if they are negatively impacted by what - which makes the desire to find the cause of effect/guilty oarty/or a scapegoat) in order to disincentivice adblockers. If the articles assumptions are correct, and it is beyond googles engineering teams to fix that issue (which seems unreasonabke to assume) theb that would be a pretty (and petty) malign and antisocial policy to pursue. (Don't be evil once was a thing for good reason)

[jsnell]

What you're ignoring is that this was a change to an ad blocker[0], not a change to the site.

Google did not implement a change to stop counting views. An ad blocker intentionally[1] choosing to block the long-standing API calls used for the view statistics. How would you propose Google fix this, when there is an adversarial team in control of what requests many browser may make, and are choosing to use it to break the site?

[0] Or rather, an URL block list used by many ad blockers.

[1] It was almost certainly an honest mistake originally. But when the blocklist authors were informed of the problem and chose to not roll back the change, it became intentional.

[kulahan]

Why are we not counting financial reasons? Yeah, it’s a number both creators and advertisers looking to strike a direct advertising/sponsorship deal can use as an easy point of reference, which cannot readily be modified by the creator.

But to your point, the site is borderline social media nowadays when you consider all the features.

Bragging rights for sure. Many channels are parasocial relationships, and that number matters a lot to both the creator and the viewers.

It’s also mildly informational. If I see a completely out-of-whack suggestion in my feed, but it has a billion views, suddenly I know why it’s in my feed.

There are probably other reasons. I remember there was ongoing reporting about a race between two channels on YouTube racing to have… I dunno, the first video with a billion views or something. The number of video views for Gangnam Style was something everyone was talking about.

Plus, it’s nice to have. That’s reason enough imo.