YouTube’s “200 billion” shorts views aren’t what they seem.
Come on YouTube, that’s cheating!
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YouTube Shorts now attract, on average, 200 billion views per DAY.
That’s according to Neil Mohan, YouTube CEO. He announced the number during his presentation last week to an audience at Cannes Lions - the annual advertising festival.
Given his audience you can see why Mohan would want to shout about those numbers: Cannes Lions hosts advertising execs and media buyers from around the world. These are the people who spend some of the $36.1 billion YouTube made in 2024. Of course he wants a big round number to sell to them.
Two billion daily views? Who wouldn’t want to shout about that to a roomful of “Mad Men” (and women)?
Of course the announcement also attracted a good deal of coverage in the trade press around the world. For YouTube, that’s an unequivocal win.
I’m reliably informed by my sport-loving ten year old that if Cannes Lions was a football match, Mohan scored a screamer. Back of the net!
But here’s the thing: it is slightly easier to score a goal when you have the power to widen the goalposts.
How YouTube moved the goalposts
You see, back in March, YouTube quietly announced a minor change to YouTube Shorts - specifically in how views are counted.
Previously, YouTube only recorded a Shorts view after a user watched for more than “a certain number” of seconds (YouTube were - and remain - deeply cagey about exactly how many seconds count).
But in their March update, they changed Shorts analytics to record a view as soon as the short displays on a user screen.
This means effectively a user could be flicking through their shorts feed, watching nothing, yet every short displayed in that session would count as a view. This, by the way, is in line with how TikTok reports view count.
According to YouTube this change was intended to bring the metric in line with user expectations and to help people understand their analytics better. In their words: "we’ve heard that you want to understand how often your Shorts are seen”.
It also means that, overnight, YouTube suddenly recorded significantly more YouTube shorts views.
A purely coincidental benefit, I’m sure.
How many more views are we talking?
Shortly after the changes rolled out, the New Statesman podcast (which I oversee), had something of a viral hit on YouTube shorts, and the data from that may go some way to help answer that question.
Viral hits are always strange. I tend to sign off our regular content for publishing and get on with my day, not really thinking about the views until later. But sometimes I, or one of the team, check back in on the stats… and do a double take at the view count.
First I tend to think, “that must be wrong.”
Then I think, “huh, what did we do right? And can we do it again?”
That was the case with this short we published about the international trade tariffs imposed by Donald Trump.
In the first day of publishing the views just kept shooting up and up, until the count reached just over 1.5 million views and became our most successful Short ever.
Rob Le Mare, our video producer, and I kept asking each other, “what is going on with that Short?” Until, much later than it should have, realisation dawned: YouTube had changed their view count mechanism that week.
When YouTube made the change in Shorts view count, they did make provision to allow people to measure the old view count number - by creating a new metric called “Engaged Views”.
Simply put, an engaged view is exactly the same as the old “view” metric: it counts every time a Shorts view reaches “a certain number” of seconds.
Here are the numbers for the New Statesman Podcast’s viral hit Short:
Views (new count): 1,524,326
Engaged views (old count): 982,188
By changing the way views are counted, YouTube added more than a third to our total view count for that specific short.
It doesn’t change the fact it was a viral hit. Even by the previous counting method, over 980,000 is still an awful lot of views - enough to make that short our second-highest performing ever.
But it’s also true that 600,000 is a lot of additional views that simply weren’t counted before.
That ratio continues across our entire catalogue of shorts - so it’s not just a one-off.
Of course, this is a sample taken from just one channel. But if the ratio holds across the whole of YouTube, then Mohan’s claimed 200 billion daily Shorts views translates to around 133 billion engaged views (or what views were, in old money). That’s a difference of 66 billion views per day.
Why does this matter for podcasts?
If nothing else, the whole point of this post is to serve as a reminder: take platform headline stats with a pinch of salt!
It’s notable to me that Mohan announced this number at Cannes Lions where, for all the talk of creativity and innovation, everyone is absolutely there to find ways of making more money.
YouTube remains the world’s largest video platform, but it’s never totally insulated from challengers like TikTok (even though the Chinese platform’s reported daily views are a fraction of YouTube shorts at “just” one billion per day).
Platforms remain in a constant battle for both users and - more importantly - advertisers, so it is absolutely in their interests to enhance key performance indicators (KPIs) wherever possible.
Like many, I’m still wholly enthusiastic about the possibilities of YouTube for podcasters. But that enthusiasm must be tempered with a clear-eyed assessment of platform motivations. Their goal is to make money. To do that they sell advertising, by maximising views. And if they need to move the goalposts slightly to reach that nice round number, they absolutely can.
As the artist Richard Serra said: if something is free, “you are the product”.
It’s up to us to make sure that we’re getting fair value in return.
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One last thing before I go. As I wrote this, Jeremy Enns (Scrappy Podcasting) and Lower Street launched the Podcast Marketing Trends Report. I’m yet to digest it but if it’s as good as last year’s it will be well worth a read. Get it here.
As ever, thank you so much for reading!
Until next time,
Chris
PS. sorry this one was a couple of days late - I normally write on Sundays, but when the US bombed Iran we decided to record an emergency issue of the New Statesman podcast, which took me out for the evening! Normal service will resume next week.
PPS. Don’t forget to sign up the Podcast Crew waitlist!