YouTube is changing how a view is counted soon

YouTube has announced that they’re changing up how public views will be accounted for. According to the video streaming platform, from 24 August onwards a view will be counted the moment a video begins to play, from the very first frame.

This change essentially uniforms the way they count views with Shorts, with YouTube having already used this method to track views on Shorts since last year. According to YouTube, this move is to eliminate the metric confusion for creators, who previously had to track different view methods on different video formats.

The original view metric for long form videos on YouTube worked by tracking users who watched for at least 30 seconds. It’s not fully being replaced though, as this is now being renamed as ‘Engaged Views’, which creators can track in their YouTube analytics section to see how many viewers keep watching their video.

On top of that, YouTube added that this change will not impact creators’ earnings and their eligibility for the YouTube Partner Program. Creator earnings will continue to be based on ‘engaged Shorts views’ and ‘engaged watch hours’, while for Partner Program eligibility, they will use ‘qualified Shorts views’ and ‘qualified watch hours’ instead.

As mentioned earlier, content creators will start seeing the new view metric applied everywhere on the platform wherever views are shown. This change does also come with the added caveat that total view counts will increase faster moving faster, though you can still track the old 30-second views in your analytics page.

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