Ongoing YouTube Platform News

Profanity Update​

Cuss words are now allowed for full monetization again within the first 7 seconds of a video. This doesn’t mean that advertisers don’t have filters of their own to keep theirs ads away from the temporal proximity of naughty words, though, so it’s still a bad idea. Bad words in the title and thumbnail will still get you limited monetization.

 
Aside: YouTube has surpassed $100 billion in creator payouts. That's a lot of money!

Sponsored Segment Insertion​

On the Creator Insider video (embedded below) YouTube announced some things like being able to link out from Shorts to sponsors and other items like that, but the one that stuck out to me was...

Instead of having to burn in sponsored segments into your long-form videos, they're working on being able to trigger the insertion of a separate piece of video for those segments. The benefit here is you can remove them when a sponsorship expires, replace them with other sponsors at that point to re-earn for those videos, and whatever other creative ideas people will come up with.

That's great versus editing out those segments using the built-in editor in YouTube Studio, though I'd have negotiated higher terms to make them permanent, which I suppose most people do anyways. But here's the video if you're interested:

 
Seems like a lot of creators are having issues with YouTube nowadays because, presumably, YouTube changed how views work.

The reason for that is - again, presumably - because YouTube is not serving as many views as before with its algorithm shifting toward stricter AI moderation and a new “engaged views” system. Turns out this system hides more videos in restricted mode and only counts/watch-promotes views with interactions (likes, comments, shares), reducing overall visibility and reach.

Here is a video talking about it. He made follow up videos for anyone interested.

 
Upsilon said:
Seems like a lot of creators are having issues with YouTube nowadays because, presumably, YouTube changed how views work.
Click to expand...
They definitely changed Shorts views to be impressions, and only in the dashboard can you find true views, which are "engaged views". They did this to have their view counts be more in alignment with how TikTok works, apparently.

But this recent rash of longform views going down... people had all kinds of theories. It's the AI child verification thing, it's restricted mode in overdrive, it's this and that. What it turned out is uBlock Origin blocked YouTube's specific URL that registers views into the system. This is why views went down but likes-to-views went sky high. It's also why revenue stayed the same but RPM went way up. Any metric surrounding views changed while revenue remained the same. You also see a drastic drop in Desktop viewers on this same day (August 13th or so, if I recall), because TV and mobile ad blockers aren't quite as easy to install.

But YouTube absolutely shifted the recommendations algorithm away from "news feed / recency bias" to try to surface more of the evergreen gold on the platform, which definitely will pull away from new users. This, combined with the push for new accounts to get some exposure, eroded a significant amount of real views (not just uncounted ad-blocked views).

If you go to YouTube with the intention of escaping algorithm nonsense from Google SEO, don't. It's the exact same rollercoaster going on over there.
 
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