RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 4 sourcesYouTube CEO Neal Mohan just announced a change that will boost numbers for star podcaster Alex Cooper — and every other YouTube creator. Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for YouTube
How popular is that viral video you just saw?
That question is harder to answer than you'd think: Different platforms count "views" differently.
Now YouTube is moving to a standard more of its competitors use — which tells you a bit about the way YouTube views the competition.
YouTube is the world's biggest video platform. Now it has figured out how to become bigger.
Even better: Google's video site is going to pull this off without spending a dime.
It's going to change the way it counts.
That's the upshot from a new policy the company announced Monday. The details won't make much sense to you unless you're a professional YouTube watcher, but the gist is YouTube is going to be more permissive about the way it counts views — which means view counts are going to go up.
Crucially, this won't affect the way YouTube counts views when it comes to Things That Involve Money — things like figuring out how it shares ad revenue with creators, or totaling up how much exposure an advertiser's video received. This change only affects "public views" — a purely cosmetic metric.
So why bother? YouTube says it's doing this on behalf of video creators who complain that YouTube's old system causes "confusion." But that doesn't fully explain it.
A slightly more useful answer is that other video platforms, like TikTok and Reels, already use a view-count system like the one YouTube is moving to, so this brings YouTube in sync with that.
But the most useful answer is that this will boost YouTube's numbers. Same platform, bigger metrics.
And that's most important to video creators that YouTube is always courting: It gives them the ability to tell a potential advertiser that a YouTube video that previously had 100,000 views now has, say, 150,000.
Again: Any remotely savvy advertiser will know the video didn't magically get more popular. But they'll also know that YouTube is counting views the same way TikTok does, so they no longer have to do extra math to understand a clip's reach or a creator's potential.
The change should help creators when they're trying to do "brand deals," as Rene Ritchie, a video maker who's now head of editorial at YouTube, tells me. "It will give them a better sense of how many people are reaching."
One more bit of translation: I think this move is another acknowledgment from YouTube that it no longer owns video.
That's been obvious for years, of course. It was certainly obvious when YouTube rolled out Shorts, its TikTok clone — you only copy the competition if the competition is working.
This tell is a bit more subtle: It tells creators "we know you're working with other people, and that's fine. Really! We just want to make sure you keep working with us. So maybe this will help."
I also don't think it's the most meaningful thing YouTube has told creators this month.
The fact that's going to make it more difficult for new creators to make money on YouTube , by raising the hurdles to get into its main revenue-sharing program, is a pretty big deal. And one that directly affects the dollars for future would-be YouTubers.
Monday's news is for YouTubers who've already made it — and for YouTube's own bragging rights.
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