Technology

I came here to see if it was the early signs of the demise of YouTube. I secretly want all these content producers to move to a privacy-respecting platform, especially those who produce tech or privacy related content.

Now, for why I don't watch videos anymore, the medium isn't as easily consumed by me. I prefer text. At home, it's noisy and I get interrupted every 90 seconds. I lose interest quickly and fast forwarding isn't as easy as scanning text for a topic shift. My mind wanders on some topics, internally exploring that topic deeper. With text, i can just stop reading. With video, i need to realize that I'm processing a thought and hit pause, then rewind a bit. I get interrupted a lot. On the bus, I need to remember headphones and I hate when people shoulder surf. That's harder to do with text. Give me a plain text RSS feed that I can read anytime.

My theory is that we have a limited number of hours a day to view content. We also have a growing number of channels and content in general. Algorithms include new content we kight enjoy, and for every new channel we get hooked on, one of the older ones drops off.

Tv shows rarely (ever?) Last forever. Why should channels?

I'm watching less 'tube in general because youtube is obnoxious as fuck. They devote so many resources to getting you to watch ads, it actually causes the whole experience to suffer even with an adblock.

Lol 90% of comments taking the opportunity to hate on LTT and missing the point of the post. Views are dropping for multiple channels.

Also the LTT hate is mostly "He's so rich and out of touch". LTT is the mass produced TV show for tech YouTube. It's meant to be entertaining and easy to watch for the masses. I like watching most of their videos. Gamers Nexus has its place too but it's a different kind of nerd whose a lil more cynical and obsessed with specs, a lot more niche and it shows in the views.

To each their own.

the channel has lost its charm. its just puking out videos, but there is no content. no real hardware tests. only drama and clickbait crap. he has lost the techsavvy part of the viewers on his tech channel with pushing garbage into everyones face.

Eh. I lost any interest I had with Linus after the whole Gamers' Nexus thing, and I'm definitely staying away after hearing what Louis Rossman had to say about the guy.

My guess they started accounting for bot visits. Perhaps a lot of videos before were visited by bots. Not just to bump views but could be for training AI.

The more interesting part for me, that they mentioned on the WAN show, is that while viewers dropped significantly, the revenue basically hasn't changed. They're more or less making the same amount of money from half the amount of reported viewers.

YouTube is hostile to viewers unless you pay them £20 a month.

It’s like 15 ads per 2 mins screen time with 2 being unstoppable and 1 being 3 minutes long. Slightly exaggerated but not far from the truth. It’s horrible. And they slow everything down too, the main video fake buffers whereas when you’re in premium it doesn’t.

I didn’t mind paying a fiver but had to do it via the moon to get it cheap but now they have stopped that.

Stopped watching this douche nozzle when they were having a big meet and greet to celebrate their new studio. And he looks at the camera guy and tells them inf front of all the fans they're having a good time with... Overtime tonight guys, we gotta edit this footage and have it online today. Would have quit my job on the spot and as a viewer I quit my part in the bullshit right then and there.

Folks here are missing the point blaming LTT for the drop. This has been a sudden drop, too sudden to be fatigue or audience tastes changing.

Also I can see the same on my own channel. About 2 weeks ago views suddenly dropped to a third of the usual views. And even high performing videos have had trouble getting views since. Even videos with a high impression percentage are getting lower than average views.

The same wsd also reported by Second Wind (old Zero Punctuation) and their experience is the same: way too sudden drop to be anything else except YouTube adjusting their algorithm.