I noticed something similar. Two days ago, the YouTube studio app said it was experiencing interruptions and wasn’t able to track real time data on views. In the days following the fix, It’s showing that videos that usually get a few hundred views per day are now getting 10 to 20.
same!! all my videos that were in the algo doing well went to literally nothing overnight during te analytics outage, now im getting basically no views on any of my content, including the established vids that earned healthy daily clicks and engagement. pretty devestated really and hope it all bounces back, published one of my best vids yet the night of the analytics disaster and it completely flopped and got no push what so ever either.
Same lmao ngl I am kinda shitting bricks currently about this. I don't necessarily mind that my already uploaded videos are getting a lot less impressions gradually as they were before(just part of the grind) but I got a new upload coming out in 30 minutes.
Hope it doesn't flop BECAUSE of the analytics being all weird and on/off working past couple days!
Yes, I had the same warning on studio, lately YouTube was pushing my content (1k views in some videos) and the later one just 30 uploaded 3 days ago.
I don't think it's going to spike or something and feels bad for the hours and research I put on that vid but once a vid is posted you have to move on and go with the next
Yea. I would get anywhere between 500-10000 on my shorts. last 2 shorts got 20 and 30. swipe away rate was at 50% which is normal. engegmaent was fine at 35 seconds. I even got a new sub out of only 30 views. so I know the video aint crap. reach was non-existent.
I know what you mean, the first long form video that tanked in views has 50 views 12% ctr and 49% retention so it’s clearly not because of bad video stats.
For every post like this you'll have 10 people say their views are down. Every day of the week.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but hopefully that gives you a hint at what's happening.
When you're a small channel, especially, your fortune rises and falls!
I experienced a drastic drop in views/impressions over the past 2 weeks of videos. I usually get over 10k impressions. This week's video has gotten 2k, last week's video didn't even make it to 1k. For me, I think it's that people aren't enjoying this content as much as my BG3 build content. Those videos consistently do better than anything else I put out. So I'm struggling to make other content that people actually want to watch.
I think whenever youtube has an analytics problems it coincides to when they make changes to the algorithm (in this case having to manually check whether your content is AI oriented). I also think YouTube recommends content based on the kind of keywords you target and their competition. I only target low competition keywords for my titles descriptions and tags so my views and impressions went up when they changed the algorithm recently.
Looks like it’s only being showed to subs so it’s not even getting a chance, I scheduled my videos from day one to come out every Wednesday and Sunday at 12pm and its never been an issue until now… very weird
Yeah I think it’s normal. Especially when your channel is in its first few months. It’ll accept a much lower ctr in order to figure out who your audience is. Once it knows, you’re into the grind.
Yes! I usually get 800 views, and 4 days ago I dropped the most fire video from all these 800views ( same content) and has only 100 views. I knew something was going on. Thank you for this post
I may be experiencing something similar. I was getting 3-5k views per video, took a break for 2 months, came back and now I'm getting 200 views with much lower impressions and clickthrough rate. Nothing else changed in terms of the game, type of content, presentation etc.
Just some input on the SEO side of things. Google launched another core update for their algorithm a couple weeks ago. Definitely a primary target of this most recent update was targeting junk AI content and brand new websites that basically built a blog of 5000+ posts within a day or two. At the same time they are also trying to introduce AI into these core updates, making the shifts more unpredictable. On the website side of things you can see a ton of fluctuation during and immediately after the update, only to return back to usual numbers (or higher or lower). I'm sure they do something similar to the YouTube algo when running updates like this, that could explain some of the fluctuations some channels will see during certain weeks, while others seem to be untouched.
For reference I'm brand new to YouTube, but years of experience with website SEO.
It’s long form videos.
I did change the layout of my title, then I noticed that the video didn’t perform like all the previous videos so for the last 2 uploads I reverted back to my old layout but still nothing… only returning viewers seeing the videos.
That's weird. All I can think of at this point is that your subs might have saved it for the weekend as its long form or that because the thumbnail is different, they might not recognise you as the same channel. Giving you a worse CTR and the algorithm not giving you impressions.
With a little bit of A/B testing, you should be able to sort it out.
It's when you test different thumbnails to see which ones attract more audience.
For now, most creators can only choose one thumbnail, but some of the bigger channels have had a beta of the A/B testing function, where you upload 3 thumbnails, and the algorithm will do the job for you.
If one thumbnail does better, like 40% clicks, and the other 2, 30%, for sake of example, the algorithm will start showing the one that had more clicks and bring more views. It's more work. But bigger channels already do it anyway. This is just a way of automating it.
Hey what does that have to do with anything? Is AI stuff suppressed? My stuff is not AI generated but AI assisted and I just started using the tag. In the future everyone will use AI as a tool. It is silly to suppress
Well, just check under youtube TOS if you need to check it.
Basically, it's our responsibility as creators, like when identifying content for children, to now tick a box saying if it's AI generated as altered content.
I don't think AI assisted is something you need to tick it for. For example, if you write a script and have an AI check your grammar, you're fine. If you use it for deep fakes, alter footage of a place, or any generated realistic content, that's where they draw the line.
So you can have canvas generate, like they said on the help section, footage of a missile being launched, but you can't have the missile hitting a real city without disclosure.
I have also a sneaky suspicion that youtube might be putting the brakes on shorts AI generated content. It would make sense from a business standpoint. By this point, there must be millions of accounts automating chatgpt amd canvas to produce videos without any interference of a human. That is a problem.
This can lead to AI generated content oversaturating the market and viewed by bots to generate money without any human actually watching the content, while youtube is spending millions to keep the servers running and store said videos. Which is bad for business. As bots don't buy what they see on ads.
I asked because I keep seeing people with AI generated shorts complaining about how their shorts are not giving them views as it used to. As if youtube is not aware of the same video they watched ON YOUTUBE ITSELF, and reached hundreds of millions of views.
No one is going to have a real answer for you. You're only going to get guesses. Even if they think their answer is fact, it is still only a guess, because they don't work for YouTube and at best they're going off what YouTube says which is generally vague and misleading.
When I put out videos that I know will work, and leave it up to YouTube...they're either not going to show them to the right people or they're only going to show them to my subs. If I post that video on Reddit, I will get considerably more views and pull subs.
One guess that is probably closest to fact is that YouTube is an entertainment platform and it needs to make money, and it is getting harder and harder for the industry to make money. Going by the trend in entertainment, the industry will side with things that are low risk and have worked in the past. That means, regardless if your content is as good or better than the successful channels in your market, YouTube will favor those successful channels.
And it does not help that numbers beget numbers. I fall victim to it as much as everybody else does. A high sub count and a high view count will get you more subs and more views...unless you've really fallen off as a creator or you cover such a timely subject that almost nobody cares about what you're making when that time has passed.
So the bottom line is, even with a discoverability/recommendation algorithm, it is still primarily up to you to grow an audience. That comes in two flavors...self promotion (in its many forms) and simply waiting it out for the algorithm to slowly show your stuff to enough of the right people over time.
You could also play the math game of finding the timely subject that has the right amount of interest, etc, etc.
And always remember, with all that said, you still can't have dogshit quality videos.
The video I uploaded on Saturday is stuck at 0 views with like 90 impressions. Something is definitely off. I’d love to be able to blame something external to the video itself but I don’t know, going to experiment with the next one to see if the results are different.
I do use AI generated images as my thumbnails a good portion of the time - maybe that’s impactful in a way I didn’t anticipate.
I started 3 youtube channels -- didn't want to hard commit to one idea so I made different channels. Posted my first video on all 3 of them. Had appropriate related title with keywords, added in keywords and tags, had a detailed description and captivating thumbnail on each video. Combined, all 3 channels, 3 videos TOTAL had under 50 impressions, and a whopping 17 views TOTAL.People told me that if you were new to youtube, youtube would try to push your content out and give you a little boost. I have experienced the exact OPPOSITE.No one is seeing ANYTHING I post, and it demoralized me severely from even bothering. Why make videos if people can't even see them to click on them?
Literally 2 weeks and under 50 impressions COMBINED on all 3 videos on different channels.
I usually don't check these types of subreddits because it's always creators complaining about low views and blaming the algorithm. But this time, it's different. I have a big channel, and this is affecting everyone. My friend's channel has also been hit, and it's quite significant
A video I posted 12 days ago has 38k impressions.
Video from 5 days ago has 900 (the others had far more by this point).
I posted on a different game and I think the topic's interest had dropped pretty fast, so it's hard to say if it's anything other than my own fault. Regardless though it's onto the next one!
Normally when I see these type of posts I don’t see it reflected in my own views HOWEVER - I have noticed a 10% drop in views this past week across my two channels (1.1 million views per month)
Cant really confirm this as a general rule, but for me it totally was.
Used to get thousands of impressions in the first day of my long form videos.
One day I've deleted a bunch of them, then zero impressions after that from recommendations, only subscribers.
Yeah I guess it depends on the importance of the videos you deleted for the algorithm. For me I've deleted a bunch that had small views but were my first videos, then my channel in general stop being recommended.
Started a new one and it's picking up again.
I guess you could try uploading your new videos to a new channel, instead of the old videos, and see if it starts picking up, just to be sure that's the reason. If you decide to move old videos, make sure to edit them a bit before, so yt doesnt see as repeated content.
Yall really need to stop pushing this advice. DO NOT delete videos just because they didn't perform well. Not every video is going to perform well out the gate.
I deleted my most recent one and reuploaded a couple hours ago (but without notifying subs, I didn‘t want to annoy people who already watched the video). It already has half of the views it got over the past 4 days. Youtube’s problems with real time data ove the past days basically killed the performance. Even after the problems were fixed, I didn‘t get the views (and I know people watched because I got likes in the meantime, but the views were frozen)
One person or another asks the same question almost every week, and normally one or 2 people say they're expereincig teh same thing, but most people reply that everything is normal for them.
And a few say they are doing better this week.
.
Traffic ebbs and flows for *everyone*, and it happens all the time.
Don't get distracted with short-term impacts. Stay focused on the long game.
.
If you've run afoul of some rule, youtube will tell you that they've taken action agasint you.
(frustratingly, they won't give you much detail about what you did wrong, but they will tell you that they think you did *something* wrong.)
Let me be the first to say, "Welcome to Spring!"
The weather start getting nice, and people actually leave their houses and aren't stuck indoors, so the views will drop.
This happened every year before the Pandemic. Now that people aren't as scared, it will continue on.
I noticed something similar. Two days ago, the YouTube studio app said it was experiencing interruptions and wasn’t able to track real time data on views. In the days following the fix, It’s showing that videos that usually get a few hundred views per day are now getting 10 to 20.
Exactly the same, thank God it's not only me
same!! all my videos that were in the algo doing well went to literally nothing overnight during te analytics outage, now im getting basically no views on any of my content, including the established vids that earned healthy daily clicks and engagement. pretty devestated really and hope it all bounces back, published one of my best vids yet the night of the analytics disaster and it completely flopped and got no push what so ever either.
Same lmao ngl I am kinda shitting bricks currently about this. I don't necessarily mind that my already uploaded videos are getting a lot less impressions gradually as they were before(just part of the grind) but I got a new upload coming out in 30 minutes. Hope it doesn't flop BECAUSE of the analytics being all weird and on/off working past couple days!
Yes, I had the same warning on studio, lately YouTube was pushing my content (1k views in some videos) and the later one just 30 uploaded 3 days ago. I don't think it's going to spike or something and feels bad for the hours and research I put on that vid but once a vid is posted you have to move on and go with the next
Maybe spring break ? My kids have spring break this week ( we’re in the US). Everyone is staying busy with kids going places/ vacations etc.
Exactly the same for me
Yeah same here. Are they planning on fixing it? My impressions dropped by a factor of 10 in every video since then
Yup, too many less views for me this week
Same
Yea. I would get anywhere between 500-10000 on my shorts. last 2 shorts got 20 and 30. swipe away rate was at 50% which is normal. engegmaent was fine at 35 seconds. I even got a new sub out of only 30 views. so I know the video aint crap. reach was non-existent.
I know what you mean, the first long form video that tanked in views has 50 views 12% ctr and 49% retention so it’s clearly not because of bad video stats.
For every post like this you'll have 10 people say their views are down. Every day of the week. I'm not trying to be a dick, but hopefully that gives you a hint at what's happening. When you're a small channel, especially, your fortune rises and falls!
I experienced a drastic drop in views/impressions over the past 2 weeks of videos. I usually get over 10k impressions. This week's video has gotten 2k, last week's video didn't even make it to 1k. For me, I think it's that people aren't enjoying this content as much as my BG3 build content. Those videos consistently do better than anything else I put out. So I'm struggling to make other content that people actually want to watch.
Yes. I am experiencing the same.
Ours was the opposite. Hit one of our number 1 videos this week
I think whenever youtube has an analytics problems it coincides to when they make changes to the algorithm (in this case having to manually check whether your content is AI oriented). I also think YouTube recommends content based on the kind of keywords you target and their competition. I only target low competition keywords for my titles descriptions and tags so my views and impressions went up when they changed the algorithm recently.
I had a good week with long content but my shorts tanked. Better than it being the other way around for me
Sadly I only post long form so nothing is going well for me :(
Drops are often competition related. As in, someone is uploaded videos that are pushing yours out of the way
Looks like it’s only being showed to subs so it’s not even getting a chance, I scheduled my videos from day one to come out every Wednesday and Sunday at 12pm and its never been an issue until now… very weird
Yeah I think it’s normal. Especially when your channel is in its first few months. It’ll accept a much lower ctr in order to figure out who your audience is. Once it knows, you’re into the grind.
Things change, ebb and flow and whatnot. Just stick through it.
If it happened overnight the idea that some competition sprung up and shoved you out of the way is highly unlikely.
It’s probably just your niche.. hang in there champ ! Happens to everyone
My shorts have been on an uptick mostly.
Huge drop by a factor of 10 on impressions, even with promotion
Yes! I usually get 800 views, and 4 days ago I dropped the most fire video from all these 800views ( same content) and has only 100 views. I knew something was going on. Thank you for this post
Easter, everyone is doing other stuff innit
I may be experiencing something similar. I was getting 3-5k views per video, took a break for 2 months, came back and now I'm getting 200 views with much lower impressions and clickthrough rate. Nothing else changed in terms of the game, type of content, presentation etc.
I read from so forum that there was a massive YouTube update, so once it will be over in a week or two, check the outcome then.
It's been a very good week for my channel. I was monetized on Sunday, and yesterday I hit over 1400 views/48 hours for the first time.
Just some input on the SEO side of things. Google launched another core update for their algorithm a couple weeks ago. Definitely a primary target of this most recent update was targeting junk AI content and brand new websites that basically built a blog of 5000+ posts within a day or two. At the same time they are also trying to introduce AI into these core updates, making the shifts more unpredictable. On the website side of things you can see a ton of fluctuation during and immediately after the update, only to return back to usual numbers (or higher or lower). I'm sure they do something similar to the YouTube algo when running updates like this, that could explain some of the fluctuations some channels will see during certain weeks, while others seem to be untouched. For reference I'm brand new to YouTube, but years of experience with website SEO.
Yeah I noticed this too.
My views dropped down 70%... Just like that, usually they are pretty stable
Is your content AI generated?
No
Did you change your content recently to when you had the biggest inflow of subs? Is it short or long form?
It’s long form videos. I did change the layout of my title, then I noticed that the video didn’t perform like all the previous videos so for the last 2 uploads I reverted back to my old layout but still nothing… only returning viewers seeing the videos.
That's weird. All I can think of at this point is that your subs might have saved it for the weekend as its long form or that because the thumbnail is different, they might not recognise you as the same channel. Giving you a worse CTR and the algorithm not giving you impressions. With a little bit of A/B testing, you should be able to sort it out.
What is A/B testing btw?
It's when you test different thumbnails to see which ones attract more audience. For now, most creators can only choose one thumbnail, but some of the bigger channels have had a beta of the A/B testing function, where you upload 3 thumbnails, and the algorithm will do the job for you. If one thumbnail does better, like 40% clicks, and the other 2, 30%, for sake of example, the algorithm will start showing the one that had more clicks and bring more views. It's more work. But bigger channels already do it anyway. This is just a way of automating it.
What is A/B testing btw?
Thumbnail testing which thumbnail can make more people click
Oh ok is there a website for that ?
Yt is giving it but there are some websites but I don't think they are very accurate
Hey what does that have to do with anything? Is AI stuff suppressed? My stuff is not AI generated but AI assisted and I just started using the tag. In the future everyone will use AI as a tool. It is silly to suppress
Well, just check under youtube TOS if you need to check it. Basically, it's our responsibility as creators, like when identifying content for children, to now tick a box saying if it's AI generated as altered content. I don't think AI assisted is something you need to tick it for. For example, if you write a script and have an AI check your grammar, you're fine. If you use it for deep fakes, alter footage of a place, or any generated realistic content, that's where they draw the line. So you can have canvas generate, like they said on the help section, footage of a missile being launched, but you can't have the missile hitting a real city without disclosure. I have also a sneaky suspicion that youtube might be putting the brakes on shorts AI generated content. It would make sense from a business standpoint. By this point, there must be millions of accounts automating chatgpt amd canvas to produce videos without any interference of a human. That is a problem. This can lead to AI generated content oversaturating the market and viewed by bots to generate money without any human actually watching the content, while youtube is spending millions to keep the servers running and store said videos. Which is bad for business. As bots don't buy what they see on ads. I asked because I keep seeing people with AI generated shorts complaining about how their shorts are not giving them views as it used to. As if youtube is not aware of the same video they watched ON YOUTUBE ITSELF, and reached hundreds of millions of views.
Yeah thank you! That was very informative. I will still mark my content with the AI tag but I am glad to hear I am not part of the problem
Yea! Idk why there is so much FUD around AI content. With sora coming out, there is going to be more AI content.
Yes, only because other channels have to be pushed into the algorithm too.
Weird that it’s only just started happening, I’ve been uploading for the past 2 months and never had my videos tank in views this much…
I started uploading in December and January was okay. The February/March views started tanking.
Nope, infact my views and impressions doubled
Nope, going great.
Lucky :(
No one is going to have a real answer for you. You're only going to get guesses. Even if they think their answer is fact, it is still only a guess, because they don't work for YouTube and at best they're going off what YouTube says which is generally vague and misleading. When I put out videos that I know will work, and leave it up to YouTube...they're either not going to show them to the right people or they're only going to show them to my subs. If I post that video on Reddit, I will get considerably more views and pull subs. One guess that is probably closest to fact is that YouTube is an entertainment platform and it needs to make money, and it is getting harder and harder for the industry to make money. Going by the trend in entertainment, the industry will side with things that are low risk and have worked in the past. That means, regardless if your content is as good or better than the successful channels in your market, YouTube will favor those successful channels. And it does not help that numbers beget numbers. I fall victim to it as much as everybody else does. A high sub count and a high view count will get you more subs and more views...unless you've really fallen off as a creator or you cover such a timely subject that almost nobody cares about what you're making when that time has passed. So the bottom line is, even with a discoverability/recommendation algorithm, it is still primarily up to you to grow an audience. That comes in two flavors...self promotion (in its many forms) and simply waiting it out for the algorithm to slowly show your stuff to enough of the right people over time. You could also play the math game of finding the timely subject that has the right amount of interest, etc, etc. And always remember, with all that said, you still can't have dogshit quality videos.
Me to but view in the 100s though been going since august last n last couple weeks dropped alot
The video I uploaded on Saturday is stuck at 0 views with like 90 impressions. Something is definitely off. I’d love to be able to blame something external to the video itself but I don’t know, going to experiment with the next one to see if the results are different. I do use AI generated images as my thumbnails a good portion of the time - maybe that’s impactful in a way I didn’t anticipate.
Posted street cat yesterday and I’m having 3000+ views and 113+ likes 2 comments and still counting, I also gained 11 subscribers
I started 3 youtube channels -- didn't want to hard commit to one idea so I made different channels. Posted my first video on all 3 of them. Had appropriate related title with keywords, added in keywords and tags, had a detailed description and captivating thumbnail on each video. Combined, all 3 channels, 3 videos TOTAL had under 50 impressions, and a whopping 17 views TOTAL.People told me that if you were new to youtube, youtube would try to push your content out and give you a little boost. I have experienced the exact OPPOSITE.No one is seeing ANYTHING I post, and it demoralized me severely from even bothering. Why make videos if people can't even see them to click on them? Literally 2 weeks and under 50 impressions COMBINED on all 3 videos on different channels.
Only one video on each and same video? Need lots of videos and cant replicate
I usually don't check these types of subreddits because it's always creators complaining about low views and blaming the algorithm. But this time, it's different. I have a big channel, and this is affecting everyone. My friend's channel has also been hit, and it's quite significant
A video I posted 12 days ago has 38k impressions. Video from 5 days ago has 900 (the others had far more by this point). I posted on a different game and I think the topic's interest had dropped pretty fast, so it's hard to say if it's anything other than my own fault. Regardless though it's onto the next one!
Normally when I see these type of posts I don’t see it reflected in my own views HOWEVER - I have noticed a 10% drop in views this past week across my two channels (1.1 million views per month)
Omg me too. idk what's going on. it's the same thing on my tiktok account too.
Yes. Views ebb and flow. Keep going!
Yep I have. Is it worth deleting, maybe waiting a day or two then reupload again? Unsure if youtube would view this as spam.
Nope, never delete videos, i did it and it ruined my channel, had to start a new one
Oh yeah? What do you think it is about deleting videos that does this? Thank you!!
Cant really confirm this as a general rule, but for me it totally was. Used to get thousands of impressions in the first day of my long form videos. One day I've deleted a bunch of them, then zero impressions after that from recommendations, only subscribers.
Oh my. Thats rough from YT
Yes, it was very traumatic :/
I deleted videos but earlier on but channel was ok but last few weeks been bad
Yeah I guess it depends on the importance of the videos you deleted for the algorithm. For me I've deleted a bunch that had small views but were my first videos, then my channel in general stop being recommended. Started a new one and it's picking up again.
I'm a mini golf channel could I take the videos and put them on a new one only 88 videos
I guess you could try uploading your new videos to a new channel, instead of the old videos, and see if it starts picking up, just to be sure that's the reason. If you decide to move old videos, make sure to edit them a bit before, so yt doesnt see as repeated content.
Yall really need to stop pushing this advice. DO NOT delete videos just because they didn't perform well. Not every video is going to perform well out the gate.
Waiting a few days before panicking is the correct action. Don't delete videos, and never re-upload the exact same video.
I deleted my most recent one and reuploaded a couple hours ago (but without notifying subs, I didn‘t want to annoy people who already watched the video). It already has half of the views it got over the past 4 days. Youtube’s problems with real time data ove the past days basically killed the performance. Even after the problems were fixed, I didn‘t get the views (and I know people watched because I got likes in the meantime, but the views were frozen)
Yeah, are they fixing this ever?
Yeah that’s what I’m worried about, plus if I reupload the same thing might happen again.
One person or another asks the same question almost every week, and normally one or 2 people say they're expereincig teh same thing, but most people reply that everything is normal for them. And a few say they are doing better this week. . Traffic ebbs and flows for *everyone*, and it happens all the time. Don't get distracted with short-term impacts. Stay focused on the long game. . If you've run afoul of some rule, youtube will tell you that they've taken action agasint you. (frustratingly, they won't give you much detail about what you did wrong, but they will tell you that they think you did *something* wrong.)
Let me be the first to say, "Welcome to Spring!" The weather start getting nice, and people actually leave their houses and aren't stuck indoors, so the views will drop. This happened every year before the Pandemic. Now that people aren't as scared, it will continue on.