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YouTube creators have begun sounding the alarm after the platform announced it would change how views are counted, saying they worry there will be a deluge of “AI slop” – low-quality, mass-produced content produced by AI – on the platform.
According to a post uploaded to YouTube’s X account on Monday, Aug. 17, a view will be counted as soon as the video starts playing, rather than at the 30-second threshold that has been in place, which helped creators and advertisers know how many people stayed to watch the video. The platform wrote in the post that this move is “standardizing views to reflect creators’ true exposure across YouTube, making it easier to show their value to brand partners.”
Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s creator liaison, tells USA TODAY that the platform decided to make this change, which starts Aug. 24, because it expects brand partners to gravitate towards this updated view count for its simplicity and consistency across formats. However, the platform will continue to count views from users who watch a video for more than 30 seconds, which are known as “Engaged Views,” and creators will still have access to those analytics.
Many creators have expressed confusion and concern about the update, including Timeworks, a YouTuber with over 750,000 subscribers, and Deep Humor, a commentary channel with over 257,000 subscribers, both of whom made videos about the change.
One of the most vocal critics is the YouTuber Moist Cr1TiKaL, whose real name is Charlie White, a commentary creator with over 18 million subscribers. “This new YouTube change is my second least favorite they’ve ever made, second only to dislikes being removed,” White said in his video uploaded on Monday.
White argues that this new policy change will incentivize AI slop creators to ramp up production of the low-quality, mass-produced content that’s finding an increasingly large number of viewers on the platform. According to an analysis published in The Guardian last year, “Nearly one in 10 of the fastest growing YouTube channels globally are showing AI-generated content only.” After The Guardian reached out to YouTube, the platform took action and said it removed three of the channels and blocked two others from getting money from its revenue-sharing program, but did not specify which two channels that was.
White also says the view count change will lead to more artificial inflation of view counts by bot farms, an elaborate scheme run in warehouses similar to data centers where “hundreds and thousands of smartphones [are] controlled by one computer,” Fast Company reports. “Racks of phones use fake social media accounts and mobile apps to share and engage. The bot farm broadcasts coordinated likes, comments, and shares to make it seem as if a lot of people are excited or upset about something like a volatile stock, a global travesty, or celebrity gossip—even though they’re not.”
Ritchie, the YouTube creator liaison, says that the platform’s systems have a long history of addressing inauthentic engagement, including botting; nothing in this update changes that.
“They’re framing it in a way where it’s like, ‘Oh, this is a better way for creators to get noticed by brands because the views will be higher,'” Kayla Rosa, a YouTuber with over 176,000 subscribers who makes video essays on pop culture, tells USA TODAY. “But the issue is that the brands are still going to be looking for what’s called engaged views. They want to know how many people will watch beyond 30 seconds, because they want to know how many will be willing to stay for an ad.”
She says this new update will make it harder for viewers to find quality content and for people to discern what’s real and what’s not on the platform. And it will make it harder for creators to know how to improve their videos’ quality.
This change aligns YouTube with how TikTok and Instagram count views. But YouTube has typically leaned towards longer formats than those platforms. YouTubers who make videos longer than 30 minutes will be most affected by this change, says Jamie Cohen, an associate professor of media studies at Queens College who has been studying YouTube since 2007.
“This shift actually means that people who use AI to increase their volume or their speed will outnumber any of the new creators that are coming to the spaces, especially in the animation space or artist space or anyone that’s doing non-vlogging content,” Cohen tells USA TODAY, adding, “It’s going to de-democratize YouTube.”
But creators and the audience still have some power to push back against YouTube’s change, given its history of responding to audience feedback, especially regarding AI-generated content, Cohen says. “By changing the view count, while it doesn’t change the view hours, it changes the way that people, viewers, the audience sees success.”