YouTube views are down (don't panic)

Summary

Many YouTube content creators, myself included, noticed something in early to mid-August: views were down. After being on the platform since 2006 (though for me, not being a 'professional' YouTuber until about 5 years ago), I'm used to seasonal dips, adjustments after new tweaks to the algorithm or layout/design changes. But this was substantial. I had 4 10/10 videos in a row, which is unprecedented. I mean, my content could just be terrible all the sudden, and I've lost all but my core audience. But there are other explanations. Especially when the exact same thing happened to a large number of my peers on YouTube. What happened (anecdotally) For my own channels, Jeff Geerling, Geerling Engineering, and Level 2 Jeff, the view counts on new long-form videos took an absolute nosedive sometime in early August. And they haven't recovered. What's strange is the raw count of likes (people who watched the video and appreciated it enough to hit 'thumbs up') was consistent. And stranger still, overall revenue was consistent. And this meant the ratio of likes per view and revenue per view went way up. Which, I mean... outside of finance creators and scammers (sometimes hard to distinguish the two), it's hard to break past a $3-5 RPM (revenue per mille), so I can't complain there. But that's just my anecdata. One YouTuber's feelings aren't much to go on. The problem is tons of other creators noticed the same change, for example DarkViperAU, Second Wind, HAINBACH, DankPods, and more. And after discussing the problem on last week's WAN show, Dan Besser from LTT started analyzing the numbers for LTT and a number of other channels, seeing a strong correlation between views, likes, revenue, and other markers, with a sudden, statistically significant change, always in early August. What happened (scientifically) Go watch this week's WAN show, starting at 15:48, to see a bit more explanation, but Dan pulled the numbers for all three of my channels to correlate views and likes, to bu...