YouTube wants creators to pitch brands with guesstimated TV co-viewership stats

YouTube has come up with another way to pump viewcounts.

Just a few weeks after announcing it would start counting a “view” from the very first frame of a video, YouTube has added a new metric called Views (Co-Viewed) that “estimates” when multiple people are watching YouTube content together on one TV screen.

“Viewers watch an average of over 1 billion hours of YouTube on TV screens every day, and they’re often watching in groups, with friends and family,” Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s Creator Liaison, explained in a new Creator Insider video. “Until now, every TV device playback was viewed as a single view. But Views (Co-Viewed) estimates the total number of people watching on TVs.”

For example, he says, a family of three watching together will be counted as three separate people.

How does YouTube know three people are watching? It doesn’t. As Ritchie said, this is all “estimated.” Estimated how? We don’t know.

We reached out to YouTube and asked how it decides when to count multiple viewers on one device. A rep directed us to Ritchie’s video, which does not answer that question.

To be clear, though, this new metric is not a publicly available one; it only shows for creators in their YouTube Analytics tab.

And the whole goal of Co-Views, as Ritchie lays out in his video, is to extract more money from brands.

Co-Views “are a platform-backed metric, which means they can be used when negotiating brand deals to represent the full impact and value of a creator’s content on TV,” he says. He later adds that Co-Views are something “we can use for reporting, or pitching, when and how we want.”

YouTube gave a similar reason when explaining its switch to first-frame “views.” In a Help Center post, it said the new public viewcounts would “[give] creators a clearer picture of their overall exposure and [make] it easier to confidently express their true scale and value to brand partners and sponsors!”

Except, as data from Agentio has since showed, first-frame viewcounts overreport viewership by an average of 40%–so brands that sign sponsorship deals with creators based on public viewcounts are overpaying by an average of 67%.

Now YouTube has a private viewcount to potentially make them overpay, too.

As we’ve written, the most reliable metric for both creators and brands now seems to be Engaged Views. Like Co-Views, it is a creator-private metric, and only records a view once a user has been watching for a set amount of time. (Word on the street is the threshold’s around 30 seconds.)

We can’t help but wonder if this pair of changes will erode brands’ trust in YouTube’s metrics–and maybe backfire, making them less likely to work with creators whose 100% measurable video performance is becoming further and further obscured.