YouTube is changing the way that it counts Shorts views, in order to reduce confusion around how it measures Shorts engagement.
Though the new approach is also questionable, for its own reasons.
As reported by TechCrunch, Shorts views will now include the number of times a creator’s Short starts to play or replay.
So anytime your Short is on screen, and active, you’ll get a view. Which is simple, for sure, but it seems like it’s probably not a great indicator of actual engagement.
Up till now, YouTube has been somewhat vague on how it counts Shorts views, in order to stop people from gaming the system. Shorts view counts are currently based on a range of considerations, including watch time, whether a user taps on the video, etc.
This was YouTube’s explanation for how it measures Shorts watch which it shared last year:
“What we try and do with a view is have it encode for your intent of watching that thing, so that creators feel like that view has some meaningful threshold that the person decided to watch. There’s a bunch of different logic behind the scenes that goes into this, like whether or not you explicitly took an action to watch it is different than if you found it in a feed, and how much time you spend on it all that goes into whether or not the sort of view threshold is met.”
Yeah, it’s pretty vague, so this new approach will provide more clarity, even if it doesn’t exactly provide a true indicator of engagement.
But Shorts being short does make measurement of this type difficult. That’s not to say that all plays should be counted as a view, but then again, how do you accurately measure watch time in a 30-second clip that someone’s scrolling past. Slow scrollers contribute more views?
I don’t know, I get the challenge, but it also seems like measuring all appearances of a video will unevenly skew the stats, and give you an incorrect view on performance.
On that front, however, YouTube says that the update won’t impact creators’ earnings, or how they become eligible for the YouTube Partner Program, “as both of these factors will continue to be based on engaged views rather than the updated metric.”
So the original, vague view time measurement will remain, but your overall view counts will go up based on this updated measurement.
Oh, now I get it, more creators will feel good about their view counts, prompting them to post more content, while YouTube keeps measuring their actual performance the same.
The updated Shorts view measurement will come into effect on March 31st.
