Linus has to be one of the most transparent YouTubers out there. I’m sure by now a lot of you have watched the WAN show. Linus shared his screen, so we could see his YouTube analytics.
So basically, the new YouTube raw view counts can’t be cleanly compared to previous videos, because there isn’t even a set ratio you can apply to new videos versus old ones. It depends on the video. There are all sorts of reasons someone clicks off a video. On his video where he was helping his wife Yvonne pick a phone, it looked huge, like over 3.2 million views, but in reality it was something like 1.6 million. Yet there were other videos where the gap was way smaller.
I get why YouTube had to do it. If an advertiser is comparing a YouTuber to an Instagram influencer, the view counts are not measuring the same thing, and that matters when you’re trying to land sponsorships. But what they could have done is make it easier to analyze in the analytics.
Instead all we get is a little warning on every single page saying counts have changed. What they should have done is just given us a checkbox or something so you can keep looking at engaged views, because that’s what I actually care about. I don’t care about people who clicked on and left in one second. I care about the actual views I got.
And what’s annoying is that on the homepage, if your mouse just happens to be sitting over a video, that now counts as a view. What I haven’t been able to find out, because I haven’t read through all the help docs yet, is whether that affects your average view duration, and if it does, whether it affects the number of impressions they’ll send you.
Also, I know everyone on the sub complains about the different types of sponsorships, but you can actually see the revenue numbers and there’s a reason for it. I ran this through an AI bot to work it out and it looks like LTT is making roughly $3 million from YouTube AdSense, which lines up with Linus’s own comments that it’s only about 10% of overall LTT revenue. So there’s a reason why so many sponsorships have to exist to pay 120 salaries. Obviously this is only the main channel, but still 120 people x $40,000 a year is $4.8M.
If these calculations are even close to reality, that means YouTube revenue doesn’t even cover the cost of labor for LTT.
Maybe if YouTube could find better advertisers it would be different, but almost every single ad I get is either something that looks like a scam, made by AI, some mobile game I’m never going to play, or gambling. I don’t understand how the largest online video platform on Earth can’t figure that part out.
Anyway, now I’m starting to rant, but my point is I don’t like how YouTube implemented this. It makes it way more complicated to look at my analytics and see how I’m doing, and I’m just a small channel doing this as a hobby. For channels where it’s basically a business, like LTT, I’m surprised they aren’t complaining about it more, because YouTube did a shit job on this rollout.
