If you’re someone that enjoys YouTube on a daily basis, chances are, you haven’t noticed anything different over the past couple of months. However, some creators are seeing a huge change on the backend, with viewership numbers dropping by a substantial amount, with some even reporting numbers as high as 50%.
Naturally, there could be a lot of reasons why this is happening, with some suggesting that it could be due to ad blockers. And since the problem is gaining more traction from creators, YouTube has even chimed in on the situation, sharing its thoughts on why creators are seeing such huge dips in views.
A small change with big impact
YouTube doesn’t have any data to suggest that something’s wrong with the platform, but does share that there could be several reasons why views are dropping, like audience views leveling off, a change in viewing habits, competition, and perhaps most alarming, the use of ad blockers and other tools that impact reports.
Again, there isn’t any particular data that YouTube is referencing for these reasons, but TechRadar is offering its own data for the situation, thanks to information provided by AdGuard, one of the better known ad blocking solutions. As far as why these recent changes have occurred, it could be due to changes in “popular community-maintained filter lists like EasyList and uBlock’s Quick Fixes.”
These lists allow users to make granular changes to the content they filter, and, because of some small changes to the list, could have affected YouTube and its tracking data. According to TechRadar, these changes have now been removed from the lists, so, things should start to improve going forward. Naturally, it will be interesting to see how things start to change, or if they even do.
With that said, it will be easy to see whether these changes will indeed have an impact, because creators will undoubtedly chime in about these issues. If not, YouTube doesn’t look like it’s intending to make any changes. Of course, there’s a good chance that the platform is making changes all the time, but not really sharing the details or what’s happening or when it’s occurring.
Transparency has been a real issue with YouTube, and the same also applies to products from parent company Google. If you’re a creators, let us know if you’ve seen these changes with your content.
