In an attempt to make it more clear how it gauges user involvement on the site,
YouTube is changing the way it counts views on Shorts.
But there are also some issues with the updated approach.
According to TechCrunch, Shorts views will now include any moment where a creator’s Short begins to play or replay.
This implies that a short will be considered viewed whenever it is present and playing on a screen. Although this simplifies the system, it might not fairly represent actual viewer interaction.
Previously, YouTube was purposefully ambiguous about how Shorts views
were counted to prevent manipulation.
The current system considers a number of variables, including whether a user taps on the video
and how long they watch it.
According to YouTube:
“What we try and do with a view is have it encode for your intent of watching that thing, so that creators feel like that view has some meaningful threshold that the person decided to watch. There’s a bunch of different logic behind the scenes that goes into this, like whether or not you explicitly took an action to watch it is different than if you found it in a feed, and how much time you spend on it all that goes into whether or not the sort of view threshold is met.”
YouTube claims that since “both will still rely on engaged views rather than the new view count statistic,”
the move will not have an impact on creators’ earnings or eligibility for the YouTube Partner Program.
In other words, the updated counting method will result in higher overall view totals, while the original,
less precise method of calculating engaged view time will remain in place.