During the month of August, we told you about a major change in the way YouTube counts one of its main metrics: views. After applying this criterion for some time to Shorts, the social network also decided to start counting any opening of a video, of any length, as a view, from its very first frame. Until then, in order for it to count as a view, the user had to watch at least part of the video, a threshold that many reports place at half a minute of content.
As you can imagine, this had one obvious immediate consequence: the number of views was going to rise.
Now we know that it did. And the increase has been huge.
Before we continue, a brief (and necessary) note. The previous metric, based on that half-minute of viewing, still exists within YouTube Analytics. It is called Engaged views, or “engaged views,” and it will remain the platform’s reference point when it comes to sharing revenue with creators. Meanwhile, the new way of counting views is what will be shown publicly on videos across the social network.
That said, let us continue.
According to data from a new study published by Agentio, based on more than 75,000 videos, the current average engaged view rate stands at 60%. In other words, out of every 100 views counted under the new criterion, where the viewer only needs to open the video, only 60 reach 30 seconds of watch time.
Or, put another way, 40% of the views publicly displayed on YouTube videos reached an audience, but did not capture its attention. At least not to any meaningful extent.
So where are all these new views coming from? According to Agentio, autoplay explains a good part of it. Views initiated from the YouTube home page, recommendations, or autoplay itself only turn into engaged views in 20% of cases. By contrast, when someone goes directly to a video’s page, that figure climbs to 85%.
What is more, although feed-driven plays account for just 38% of the public views analyzed, they generate 77% of the gap between public views and engaged views.
At this point, the study’s authors highlight how important this gap between public views and “real” views could be for brands, and they emphasize the problems created by the fact that the “engaged view” metric remains hidden from the public, visible only to the creator who owns the channel and to certain platforms with authorized access to channel reports: “An organic integration with a creator, priced based on the number of public views, now costs 67% more. To pay for attention, and not just exposure, brands should use engaged view data, which is visible only to the creator who owns the channel and to selected platforms with authorized access to channel-level reporting.”
To explain that 67% extra cost, we need to do a little math, I am afraid.
For every 100 public views you pay for, only 60 involve a minimum level of attention to the content. To receive 1,000 “real” views, a brand has to pay for about 1,667 public views (1/0.60 = 1.667), so whatever the CPM may be ($10, $30, or $100), it will end up paying 67% more for the actual impact achieved.
In any case, this overestimation affects channels differently depending on their size. Agentio grouped them based on the average number of engaged views per video: micro (fewer than 50,000), medium (between 50,000 and 300,000), and macro (more than 300,000). After reviewing the results, they found that the public views of a micro channel, with a 54% engaged view rate, are overestimated by 85%, while those of a macro channel, with a 67% engaged view rate, are only overestimated by 49%.
These differences also depend on the type of content. Educational videos have the highest engaged view rate (63%), while technology (46%) and fitness (52%) videos rank at the bottom of the table.
Image: ChatGPT
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