YouTube’s new public viewcounts over-report actual engagement by 40%

YouTube‘s new public viewcounts over-report engagement by 40%, according to new data from Agentio.

As you probably know, YouTube last month introduced a significant change to how it counts views on long-form content. Instead of requiring people to watch for a certain length of time before considering them ‘a viewer’ (the amount has never been publicly disclosed, but word on the street is it’s about 30 seconds), YouTube decided it will count a view from the instant a video’s first frame loads.

To be clear, though, this metric only applies to public viewcounts. Behind the scenes, in their channel analytics, creators still see what YouTube calls Engaged Views, which are calculated basic on YouTube’s original view measurement system.

When this change rolled out, we had questions. Would these first-frame views apply to homepage autoplay, where a video just starts rolling when a user hovers near it? How dramatically would public views be inflated? Would brands be wary of using views to judge a creator’s audience size–and therefore their qualifications for a sponsorship deal?

We figured most of these questions could only be answered if creators were willing to share their videos’ Engaged Viewcounts versus their public viewcounts.

Now, thanks to Agentio, we have access to that data.

The creator advertising platform looked at the viewcounts of more than 75,000 videos from its network of creators and found that on average, only 6 out of 10 public views also counted as Engaged Views.

Four out of 10 views “reached an audience, but did not hold attention,” Agentio said.

The videos together ‘earned’ ~549 million public views. In back-end channel analytics, they earned 330 million. This means public viewership is (so far) overstating actual meaningful engagement by an average of 1.67x.

That inflation various significantly across creators with different subscriber counts. Agentio found that on average, public viewcounts are overstated by 85% for “micro channels” (channels with <50K subs), but 49% for “macro channels” (300K+ subs).

“If your program leans on smaller Creators for efficiency, the CPM you see on public views is the most misleading,” it told brands.

Inflation also varies across content categories. Education has a 63% Engaged View rate (meaning 63% of its public views are Engaged Views), entertainment & culture is at 60%, food & drink at 59%, fashion & beauty at 57%, lifestyle at 57%, gaming at 56%, fitness at 52%, and technology at the lowest Engaged View rate of 46%.

Agentio also–as we were keen to see–found information about what amount of inflated public views come from autoplay versus things like misclicks.

Its data showed that “feed surfaces” like homepage hovering, “up next” autoplay, and recommended shelves produce a whopping 38% of all public views across YouTube.

“But only 20% of [those views] became engaged views. That one surface is responsible for 77% of the total gap between views and engaged views,” Agentio said.

Oof.

Misclicks, on the other hand, only happen about 15% of the time. Agentio said that in 85% of cases where a viewer purposefully clicks into a video, they become an Engaged View.

YouTube introduced the new public viewcount method by saying it hoped “that having metric parity across all formats [long- and short-form] gives creators a clearer picture of their overall exposure and makes it easier to confidently express their true scale and value to brand partners and sponsors!”

But will brands see “true scale and value” in empty views? Agentio thinks not. “[A]ny Brand partnering with a Creator based on public views is likely overpaying by 67%. A $30 CPM on public views is an effective $50 CPM on engaged views‍,” it said, adding that “[t]o pay for attention, not just exposure, Brands should use engaged view data, which is only visible to the Creator who owns the channel and to selected platforms with permissioned, channel-level reporting access.”

Basically, brands need to either work with a talent and/or ad agency that allows them to see creators’ Engaged Views, or hope that individual creators will willingly share that data to prove their true reach.

Based on Agentio’s report and, well, common sense, we’re not sure this change is going to have the effect YouTube wants. Public views simply can no longer be trusted to accurately reflect a creator’s audience engagement–and savvy brands will figure that out quick.