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YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Well that's a great incentive for clickbait content - cause now it won't matter if you can keep people watching after you've reeled them in.
You'd think this would be against YouTube's own best interest, considering they want to keep you watching, and people don't often like watching that kind of clickbait-farm slop...
Or maybe I and the people I know are in the minority, and a lot of people just watch it whether they like it or not, which would be disappointing to hear.
For those of us born before YouTube, we can just leave it.
For those born in the last couple decades, legacy tv and movies are difficult to watch and are only consumed occasionally. It will never, ever occur to YouTube's primary audience to stop watching.
I mostly watch videos from channels I'm already subscribed to, but recently a few shows I watch have dropped new seasons and I was looking for recaps on YouTube. It was nothing but AI slop channel after AI slop channel. I would click off as fast as possible to not give them the view, but I guess they will all count going forward. It really sucks because we can't opt out of these channels and many of them don't even admit to being AI anyway.
I have no idea how this change is good for them. I totally agree that it seems like it'll encourage low quality content. After a few of those videos I can't imagine most people sticking around for another, but what do I know. I'm sure they have more accurate stats than I do.
Didn't see it in the article, but I wonder if on desktop at least will it count if you hover and "preview" the video before clicking on it? Hopefully not, then we can see if it is slop or not, though that will be 1 more annoying thing to do
I'm not super well versed, but my understanding was that watching the preview for more than X seconds already counted as a view. At least it was like that a while back after they were introduced.
Also be careful because these ai channels are sneaky and will use generic pictures or stills but the script and voice are all AI.
Dammit!!! At least they don't get the ad revenue from me. Yeah, that asian guy with glasses hasn't been in the thumb for a while now, but soon as I click on the vid, BOOM!, there he is
this is definitely against their interests, unless they just plan on having people watch ads everytime they open a video, watch that video for like 1 second and go to next and watch more ads. There is no depth of depravity i wont put past corporation executives, so that feels very plausible how they think and how detached they are from humans.
It could even be prelude to some other even more horrible, like they start gatekeeping actually decent stuff with premium aggressively.
We should really start archiving the good content of youtube more, just in case.. I would too, but i dont have that much extra harddrive space and i dont have energy enough to start learning to build a personal storage system that is secure and fault resistant.