The ongoing battle between YouTube and adblockers has resulted in the biggest drop in viewership that the platform has seen.
Everything was relatively normal on YouTube until Aug. 11, when channels across the platform began noticing a drastic drop in the views their videos were getting.
“Views on all my videos in the past month have consistently been about half of what they were,” said Adonis Walchuk, a YouTube creator from Regina. At first, such a sudden drop in views left Walchuk with plenty of questions. He’d consistently been seeing around 50 thousand views on his videos for many months, but since Aug. 11, that number has dropped to about 30 thousand without any apparent reason. This problem isn’t exclusive to Walchuk’s YouTube channel, as other channels across the platform have been experiencing the same thing.
“I was relieved that it wasn’t just me and something I was doing. But not being able to do anything to change it is frustrating” said Walchuk. Many channels on the platform were left confused about the sudden drop in views. Interestingly though, the drop in views didn’t change the amount of ad revenue that these channels were seeing, and the sudden drop only applied to views that came from computers. “My ad revenue stayed the same, which is good, but I’m concerned that now my videos aren’t reaching nearly as many people” stated Walchuk.
On Sept. 14, YouTube issued a statement addressing the sudden viewership drop that the platform was experiencing. In the statement, YouTube offered a list of possible explanations for the phenomenon, from something as simple as a change in viewership habits to external factors such as ad blocking tools. While YouTube has not specifically named adblockers as the primary reason for this view drop, when you look at the channel analytics, everything points to adblockers.
Adblockers are a tool that can be used on computers to prevent your web browser from displaying advertisements. Because many websites rely on advertising to earn money, most sites don’t view adblockers in a positive light. YouTube in particular has made multiple efforts to prevent the use of adblockers on their website, so this most recent situation raises questions about if this is another attempt to combat adblockers.
Despite the possible culprit being revealed, creators on the platform are still unable to do anything to reverse the viewership drop. “It doesn’t change the amount of money that they [YouTube] get, or the number of ads that they push. All it does is affect the people making the videos, and our videos’ visibility” said Walchuk, when asked if he thought the change was made to fight adblocking.
While there is no definitive answer as to why YouTube channels have experienced such a large drop in views, the statement issued by YouTube and the analytics from their website points to adblockers being the reason why this has been happening. Until a statement is released from YouTube that directly states that adblockers are the reason for this viewership drop, all creators can do is make guesses based on the information that they have. In regard to the entire situation, Walchuk said “Everything points to adblock being the reason for this site-wide dip. I hope they end up reversing whatever changes they implemented.”
