[knome]

Does the potential lesser engagement with videos matter in the face of those videos causing a delay in loading the page that displays them? You'd need to check per-video engagement drop against people not bothering to engage with the site in the first place.

[estebank]

This is an example of the tragedy of the commons: the watch time effect is tracked by YouTube, which maximises for it, but the drop off of visitors to the site is something YouTube doesn't "care" about (doesn't track it directly, doesn't optimize for it, etc.).

[crabmusket]

In this scenario, what is the "commons"?

[paulmd]

everyone else’s engagement except Google’s will be degraded by the increased page load times