Could YouTube Remove the View Counter?
In the wake of Instagram removing likes, could YouTube follow suit with the view counter?
Like, did you hear like, that Instagram has like, removed likes, like?
Okay, so maybe they haven’t removed all likes.
You can still say “like” too much, although you shouldn’t. You can still like Big Bang Theory, although you shouldn’t. And you can still click the little heart below an Instagram photo to indicate you like it, although you can’t see how many others have also done so.
And the world keeps on turning, right?
Well, as far as Instagram is concerned, they have taken a big step towards reducing the platform’s negative impact on mental health. They’ve removed an element of the platform that many place an unhealthy amount of value in — regardless of how popular that feature was. CEO Adam Moressi even went as far as to say “[Instagram] will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people’s well-being and health.”
It’s a bold claim.
Comments, where a bulk of cyber-bullying takes place, still exist — although users can disable these. It’s also arguable that as toxic as our relationship with “likes” can be, it’s the content that attracts those likes — unrealistic portrayals of perfect lives — that has the real impact. The kind of artificial portrayals that are made further possible by the face filters Instagram continues to offer, which some argue are a little too close to plastic surgery for comfort.
Personally, I’m certain that the step was taken with mental health as a consideration. But it’s tempting to allow a little bit of scepticism to lead you down a path towards a few ulterior motives. And I’ve found two hiding in the bushes.
I’ll call the first ‘personal content problem’.
“I will delete this if it doesn’t get at least 48 likes in 76.32 seconds”
As Facebook grew in scale, the amount of branded content rose while, at the same time, the desire for individuals to post more personal content decreased. Other than your crazy uncle who, I’m sure, still posts on the reg.
Fortune reported back in 2016 that original posts on Facebook were declining, as users began to see the platform as less of an intimate safe space in which to share, and more as a broad network of associates, supplemented by reams of sponsored posts. Less personal content meant the platform lost much of its appeal, and recent attempts to strengthen community-based Facebook Groups can be viewed as a direct response to this.
Instagram has found itself on a similar trajectory. The platform has been swamped by so-called “influencers” and branded content, pushing perfectionist ideas that are endorsed by millions of likes. With that scale and diversity of messages, pressure has built. On an individual level, many people are put off from posting more personal content if they aren’t certain it will garner a “respectable” number of likes.
Instagram Stories were, beyond competition for Snapchat, a solution to this. They primed us for a world in which the number of times a post has been viewed or liked wasn’t visible. Go look at your Instagram now — how many more of your friends are posting stories than in-feed pictures? My hunch would be that it’s either: A) A lot or B) Many. If I’m right, I’d suggest it’s because there’s less pressure attached to these.
For individuals, posts that perform poorly on likes can feel like their friends don’t endorse the post or even their way of life. For those who make a living on Instagram, low likes are translated into business jargon as “low engagement”. That can hurt on a creative level, but can also put off brands that may have otherwise worked with the content creator, which in turn also hurts their bottom-line.
That said, removing likes presents an altogether different business problem for influencers. Rather than risking exposing low engagement, there’s now no publicly visible signal for engagement and influence at all. Comments still exist, but these are much harder to illicit from fans.
But it’s okay, Instagram knows this — because of course, they do.
Instagram is aware of how valuable likes are to those aiming to make a business out of their audience. Estimates of the value of the “influencer economy” directly attached to Instagram vary wildly, but there’s little doubt it’s in the billions, as brands everywhere pay Instagrammers to promote products. And much of this takes place without Instagram ever touching a penny.
This brings us to our second ulterior motive for removing likes, which I’ll tentatively title: “getting some pennies”. While repeatedly checking the final word for typos.
“Sure I’ll tell ya who’s gettin’ most likes, but it’ll cost ya…”
Likes have been the most overt way for an influencer to show that they are worthy of doing business with, without having to lift a finger (beyond potentially liking their own post). It was, previously, easy for someone working for a brand to click on a profile, get a sense of engagement, and suggest an influencer for a campaign. There is a range of important metrics you may want to consider once an influencer partnership is live, from click-through to conversions. But when it comes to initial introductions, likes reign supreme. Now they’re gone, it’s a much harder process.
The lockdown on likes makes “influencer marketing” a substantially more one-way conversation, with brands forced to enlist the support of sometimes costly but often useful subscription-based platforms like Klear or Brandwatch. These benefit from increased access to Instagram’s back end data and even offer their own unique alternative metrics to likes.
Either that or a brand has to work directly with influencers and their agents to get important engagement data, which can take a lot longer if you’re simply trying to assess various options before making a choice. But they will have to do it. In the age of fake followers, vetting an influencer’s audience has become a necessary step for all campaigns.
Following a similar train of thought to the above, YouTubers Colin and Samir point out that it makes sense that, rather than allowing these third-party platforms and agents to be the beneficiaries of this process, Instagram would cut them out and provide this service themselves. You’d turn to Instagram’s ‘branded content’ team, ask for recommendations based on your criteria, or pay a subscription to access key data. In fact, we need only look to YouTube for some precedent in this space.
In 2016, Google acquired Famebit, an influencer marketing agency. Their platform allows YouTube creators to put themselves forward for brand deals. Famebit was quickly wrapped into YouTube and has currently been responsible for many thousands of partnerships. All of which, if the business model hasn’t changed post-acquisition, YouTube takes a 10% cut from.
I’m no mathematician, but that’s definitely more than Instagram’s 0% cut.
With that in mind, it seems that YouTube has taken one step to wedge itself further into the influencer economy that Instagram hasn’t: offering an in-house agency that sets up brand deals. But they haven’t taken the more aggressive step that Instagram has: limiting access to a piece of data key to identifying YouTubers to work with, in order to ensure that Famebit is the agency of choice.
But what if they did?
Removing the view counter
YouTube views are an integral part of the platform, used to assess performance and virality. But so too were likes on Instagram. Similarly to likes, this public measure of performance is also being tied to mental health and the burnout of creators on the platform. And, if we take the business rationale I’ve argued for Instagram removing likes, we could see a clear impetus for YouTube removing views in a similar way. As a matter of fact, to some extent, they’ve already done it.
Over the years, views have waned in importance to YouTube. While views and subscribers remain useful to brands and viewers, YouTube is using alternative metrics such as ‘total video watch time’ and ‘click-through-rate’, which aren’t publicly accessible to determine which videos to promote further. Another clear example of this shift in action is YouTube’s experimentation with removing the view counter from suggested videos, in favor of “new” and “recommended for you” labels — see below.
That’s not to say views aren’t still important to influencing how end-users interact with content. Seeing a video that may be interesting, and then having that validated by the fact it has many millions of views certainly makes us more likely to click. Views on YouTube are an audience tool in a far greater way than likes were on Instagram. But hey, Netflix doesn’t have a view counter. And while you may spend an awful long time browsing the content library before deciding what to watch, you do still ultimately decide (most of the time).
Despite their removal of likes, Instagram has notably continued to list video views alongside their IGTV content. On a basic level, this helps them to assert IGTV’s value against YouTube — they can shout “hey look we get lots of views too”. But when we look to TikTok, that platform doesn’t list views, instead it uses AI to continually suggest videos based on the user’s evolving viewing habits.
The differing approach to views on various platform also exposes another reason to doubt their value. Facebook has been long criticised for recording views a lot more quickly that YouTube, taking 3 seconds to register a view compared to YouTube’s more rigorous 30 seconds. This means the view counter may appear much higher on Facebook, despite fewer people actually watching the video for an extended period.
Meanwhile, many YouTubers are far outstripping the viewing numbers of many mainstream television networks but still aren’t held in the same regard. The cost per thousand views to advertise on TV typically remains higher than on YouTube. YouTube continues to communicate the value of the platform to advertisers in a variety of means beyond views, examples of which include producing both a dedicated conference and YouTube channel for this purpose. So it’s unlikely that keeping the view counter is seen as integral to driving further ad revenue. Particularly when, if YouTube itself now becomes the preferred branded content partner, the number of views would still be available to brands directly from the platform itself.
Views remain important to so many in the YouTube community, and the reaction to their removal would be strong. But likes were beloved by many Instagram users, with Nicki Minaj — who has one of the largest accounts at 103 million followers — suggesting she’d quit the platform if they were taken away. It didn’t stop Instagram, did it? In fact, it adds a third ulterior motive: maybe they took away likes to get rid of Nicki… but we’ll leave that one in the conspiracy bin, for now…
But while we’re on conspiracies — bear with me — there’s a darker reason YouTube could want the view counter hidden. When controversial content makes its way onto the platform and isn’t prevented, one of the most visceral ways media can report this failing is that “X terrible video was viewed Y many times”. And we all go “oh gosh that’s a lot of views for something so awful, bad YouTube”. Without views, it becomes a lot harder to hold this failure to account.
On the other end of the severity spectrum, it would, at the very least, make the new format for the annual YouTube Rewind — which you can find my thoughts on here — more interesting. We’d all get the joy of finally finding out which videos were the most viewed of the year. As many people pointed out, that’s something we could’ve found out this year without Rewind. But it would’ve been largely impossible if the view counter was removed. Though as much as I’d like Rewind to be more engaging, a “YouTube Giveth, YouTube Taketh Away” approach isn’t the most PR-friendly way to accomplish that.
Could it happen?
If we accept that “views” are of dubious value in a few different ways, and that there’s a broader business-case for taking them away, then there’s a chance it could happen — even if slim.
But what could a new YouTube system look like? For the sake of argument, it won’t be another clear metric that’s essentially the same as views. Here are a few initial thoughts:
- It could range from a system similar to Instagram’s, detailing which users in your network or list of subscriptions also viewed that video. This would be an interesting way of them supplementing the “community” element of the platform that they’re still striving to build.
- YouTube could bracket videos into broad ranges that still allow YouTube to extract value from offering more insightful data at a fee, from “viewed hundreds of times” to “viewed millions”.
- Or, indicating who viewed a video and how many times could simply disappear altogether — replaced by uncomfortably personal tags like “Just for you” or “You’ll love this!”, as the AI and algorithm peer deeper into your soul.
With all that said — and it was a lot, thanks if you made it this far — in reality, it’s unlikely that YouTube will ever remove views. It would be an extremely controversial move, that may well be viewed as a step too far for many users. Then again, the removal of likes on Instagram was being proposed at least four years ago, and it probably seemed unlikely to ever happen back then.
And look where we are now — whether you like it or not.
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