[FateOfNations]

What counts as “a view” has pretty much never been particularly straight forward. The question is why YouTube can't just say, “Yes, in early August we made some changes to how views are counted.”

All the available evidence seems to suggest that this is an accounting change, rather than a change in viewer behavior.

[johnnyanmac]

Despite what the words from officials are saying, this isn't exactly a year of transparency.

Though, Youtube has been like this well into the '10's, where some creators who had their entire channel shut down needed a twitter army just to provoke a response about what happened.

[jcranmer]

I've seen a number of people complain about the change, and my first guess is that it is a change in methodology rather than an organic change.

But if that's the case, why isn't YouTube coming out and saying it? Granted, it's not a great look to say "we've determined that our view counts are inflated because of $REASONS, so moving on from $DATE, we've applied a different methodology that will probably result in %xx loss in views." But the alternative of silence means that it's interpreted as "YouTube is screwing over the people they depend on for revenue because <fill in the blank>," which is at least as bad.

[geerlingguy]

Yeah... something definitely changed, it'd be nice if they at least mentioned it, so it isn't just a mystery that we have to debug with no look at the backend, just the effects.