[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.