YouTube Admits: Your Views Are Fake?

0:00Josh Cohen:This week on Creator Upload, we are going to talk about U.S. Open kicking out creators, YouTube's new public view count versus the internal creator-only view count. We're going to talk about co-viewing on YouTube. We're going to talk about Amelia de Mellenberg and the end of Chicken Shop Date and so much more. Welcome to Creator Upload, your Creator Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Lauren. Yes. I got a question for you. What? Have you heard of the brand Friday Plans? No. I hadn't either until recently. Friday Plans is an online telehealth and prescription service that specializes in providing affordable FDA-approved generic erectile dysfunction medications like sildenafil and tadalafil, which is generic sales.

0:42Josh Cohen:Sounds like what your feed would provide. Go on. Do you know how I know about Friday Plans? Yes, because you search things online that would be related to things like this, and then your phone listens to you, and then you get these ads. So I think it's pretty clear. You would think that, right? I actually know exactly how you know about this. Instead, I saw Friday Plans advertised streaming on ESPN because the U.S. Open lasts so effing long. And games don't start until into the early hours of the next morning that the advertising load transitions into where you're getting adult ads. Like Skinamax after dark kind of like.

1:26Josh Cohen:So then what happened? So then you did you look at them and then you then you Googled it and then it showed up in your feed? Like what was it? So same same Z's is what I said. But like just OK, got it. But the impetus, the starting point is the fact that this year is open. It's going too late. It's starting too late. This is the moral of the story. It's starting too late. We're not interested. We're not. I mean, I understand. I am making a dinner plan for tomorrow night. And three out of the four of us are like 6 p.m. sounds great. and one person was like, what? 8 p.m.? Like, you kidding me with an 8 p.m.

1:59Josh Cohen:dinner? Look, Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz, two of the premier tennis players in the world, were supposed to start their tennis match at 8, 10 p.m. It didn't start till 11.40. Oh, I didn't realize it started that late. I knew it went really long and then Shelton won like in an upset, yeah. No, or 11.10 at least. It started after 11. No. Advertisers and fans cannot be pleased with that. I mean. Yo. I mean. The USTA, you got to get your act together. Well, speaking of the U.S. Open, Josh, great transition. Did you know that the scales have might have tipped the other direction? So we're all about like creators should be treated, especially like everybody get the celebrity access that the other celebrities get.

2:38Josh Cohen:Totally. They got the attention, right? Get the attention, get the journalist passes. You know who's not loving this is the U.S. Open and the players on the U.S. Open, in the U.S. Open. So specifically, Naomi Osaka, her first round victory over Anastasia Zakharova was briefly paused after a group of content creators filmed a TikTok video with a ring light during one of her points. so these creators are bringing in ring lights they're making you know a lot of ruckus I think there was one that actually went on the actual court if I'm not mistaken Osaka said if you come to a sporting event you have to respect the sport I feel like it's common courtesy to read up on the sport you want people to continue to grow the sport I just think it has to be in a way that everyone knows the rules and etiquette Coco Goff big player any of any you come to you got to follow the etiquette, guys.

3:34Josh Cohen:I added the guys. That wasn't her quote. I think it might be on some brands too to maybe have a sign plastered in the suite so that they know because sometimes it's their first tennis match. I definitely think no flash photography that does bother me. I mean, they're doing flash photography. I mean, tennis, much like golf, is a quiet sport. Like it is. If you've ever been to a... Have you ever been to the Open? I've never been to a game at the Open. I'm going to the female finals this weekend. Are you really? The open's amazing. My niece actually was a ball girl for many, many years. And so for the last several years, we've been like watching her like run to get the ball and like sit there and run to get the ball.

4:09Josh Cohen:It's like a whole thing. You have to be like very good at tennis. You have to know all the rules inside and out and all the things. We're a big open family, although I'm not staying up till midnight to watch these matches. But this is bananas. So much so that a couple of creators, New York based influencers Meg Radice and Audrey Jongens, who run the lifestyle brand, The VIP List, which has more than 600 ,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, got their credentials revoked after posting a photo of their credentials online, which apparently is like prohibited. And the USTA kicked them out. Lauren, that's been disputed a little bit.

4:43The USTA also said that they were improperly credentialed, which they noticed after they posted their credentials. And so that's why they removed their credentials, not just because they were influencers, but also that doesn't help.

4:53Josh Cohen:So they shouldn't have had the credentials in the first place is what you're saying. Yeah. And then they were flexing about it. And then they posted them online. Yeah. And come on, guys. Like, play it cool for like a min, right? Yeah. I just, there's this notion that, listen, I love the disruption of our industry. I love the fact that the kind of, you know, gates are open and people have all this access to make movies and content and things that they, you know, the gatekeepers, that's the word I was looking for. or the gatekeepers, you know, are no longer really in existence the way they were.

5:23Josh Cohen:And so there's a bit of, like, in the DNA of creators being, like, rule breakers, right, in a lot of ways. But I also think that, like, we have a society that we'd like to uphold. And I think that, like, a tennis tournament is the epitome of polite society. And I just think, I don't believe that you should wear flip-flops and pajamas on a plane. And I think that when you go to a tennis... Okay, sure. I think that you wear flip-flops and pajamas on a plane. Who doesn't these days? You're disgusting. You show your toes in an airport. And so, but Lauren, you know who really likes this high society ton of stuff is Wimbledon.

5:59Josh Cohen:You think Princess Kate is going to show up when there's going to be, like, she goes, there's a royal box. You think that she's going to show up with a ring light? No. I don't believe she's going to be in flip-flops and a ring light, nor is she going to appreciate anyone else in flip-flops or a ring light there. In fact, this is according and confirmed by the Press Association, Wimbledon will not credential influencers and will confiscate ring lights next year. So based on this activity of what's going on with creators at the U.S. Open and the not positive effects of having them at the event, we will then basically preemptively ban them and said that these influencers are persona non grata at our event for next year and we're not going to tolerate any of this behavior that seems to be OK in the United States.

6:38Josh Cohen:Well, and they're specifically banning ring lights and other equipment. Right. And it's not going to credential influencers or I think go out of its way to invite some of these individuals that, like you said at the top of this segment, these different kinds of sports leagues and authorities and brands have been attempting to embrace because they've been told to embrace over the last 12, 24, 36, 48 months by people like us and just the general public and the population. Do you think good, good golf, like there's any sort of like stink on influencers and sports because of that right now? I think that it's one like cosmically aligned that this is happening around the same time.

7:17And two, I do think it's kind of like what's in the air right now where the people who are making these decisions at the upper levels of authority, at places like the USTA and Wimbledon and the US Open, they read what's in the news. They see what's going on with their cousin country club sport. And they understand that's in the air and that maybe these influencers aren't all we thought they were.

7:43Josh Cohen:Well, it's also just like we there are there. Do you think they're more emboldened to sort of like make these rules and regulations more sort of vocal and strict in the in the light of like the open and a good good golf? You know what I mean? Like with this would they have been told that they were being like racist essentially if they didn't if they did this like six months ago? I don't know. I don't think racist they would be told at all. I don't know. But yes, I do. I don't know. I totally think this gives them kind of like cloud cover and the ability to be more vocal about this and be more forthright with it, especially given the extent of the bad behavior that they've been witnessing at the U.S.

8:19Open this year. Also, in more evidence of this is just kind of a turning point for these kinds of sports, golf and tennis. For instance, during a 2026 Masters press conference, the Augusta National Golf Club chairman, Fred Riley, publicly admitted that greenlighting the YouTube group Dude Perfect to film at the course a few years earlier was a mistake. He said, quote, a couple of years ago, we had Dude Perfect playing frisbee around Amon Corner. I like those guys. But in retrospect, that may not have been the best decision.

8:47Josh Cohen:Why? I think because they want to maintain the austerity and the prestige of Augusta and having like a bunch of creators come in and kind of film trick shots, maybe they think to a certain persona and group of people that that kind of degrades the je ne sais quoi about the club. So I do think we're having this kind of a little bit of a reckoning now with how brands and leagues and other established entities should be using creators and influencers in their marketing, inviting them to events and more. I think what's going to net out of this is people are just going to continue to invite all of these creators and influencers to their events.

9:30They're just going to be more diligent about the background checks and thorough about who they are inviting to these events and separating kind of, quote, bad influencers from, quote, good influencers.

9:41Josh Cohen:Well, there's also like the model that like I know Dove was employing a couple of years ago where they really kind of build up, call it their army of really trusted sort of creators. So you don't need to invite everybody, but you find the folks that really, really align with their brand. And this sort of goes back to like the whole notion that like, you know, brands should be working with creators in a sort of more long term and less transactional kind of way. and so instead of okay the open happens once a year we like invite like 100 influencers and we don't really know them well and like this kind of is crazy whereas like through the entire year maybe there's 10 to 20 that they work with in a really like dedicated way that really respect and love the sport and have big followings and then they have them at the sort of tournament and then it's like a much better experience for everybody you know what i mean like i think that also is like a model that like could be very interesting to to employ it just seems like an easier model to employ too, where they have a relationship with these individuals over the course of the year or longer.

10:40And so they know what they're getting into when they invite them to these different events.

10:43Josh Cohen:One other thing that's been noted, and I'm not going to blame all the influencers on that, but apparently the stent chip weed is apparently like just raging at the open and you haven't gone yet. So it's not even you. Like, I don't even know. This is a problem though. Like living in LA, like obviously weed's been legal for a while. Fine. The problem, you go to New York and like everybody's on top of each other. So like you smell weed. It's disgusting. Like I don't you know what I mean? Like it's everywhere. It's gross. Like it's it's like it's not interested, not interested in my tennis to be smelling weed.

11:14Josh Cohen:I'm just saying. You're going to carry signs for the draft now and say, let's get into Vietnam. I mean, I might. I ain't burning my bra. I want to point out one more thing where when we do enter this world where brands and leagues and more are going to be more discerning with the types of people they invite to their events. It's going to be beneficial, I think, for both types of groups. The people that are really big bad boys and girls and have that persona online, I think are going to get more juice out of it because they're going to say like, I wasn't even invited to Wimbledon. Did you say bad?

11:46Josh Cohen:What do you mean? Yeah, there's like content creators that a lot of content creators online that get a following from being rule breakers, from being pranksters, from being counterculture. You said like bad boys. It just was a very bad girl. I don't know. I was like, is that an official kind of or is it just like Josh? Okay, got it. And I think the people who are brand safe, who can be trusted that they're brand safe and trusted that they're going to act appropriately at these kinds of events are going to be more in demand than ever as well. Next up, I want to talk about sort of what has happened and transpired since YouTube has made these changes to their sort of public view count.

12:26Josh Cohen:So as a reminder, last month, YouTube, you know, introduced the significant change into how it counts long form content. So instead of requiring people to watch for a certain length of time, of which has never really been publicly disclosed, but it's worth noting that like every platform has a historically has a different rule around this. It's like it's five seconds, it's one seconds. It's 30 seconds. What counts as a view? A view is not a standard metric across the internet. It means a million different things in a million different places, which I think arguably most people don't know. And I think capitalizing on the fact that most people don't know, YouTube was sort of geasing the flack of like, well, on TikTok, because a view clearly starts after a millisecond, then folks will put their shorts on TikTok, get a bajillion views, they put them on YouTube, and they don't get as many views.

13:13Josh Cohen:Now, is the view on YouTube worth more in that scenario, I would argue because you're actually getting real view count, but the kids don't read beyond the headline. So they're probably like, where is my view count? So they decided that they will count the view from the instant a video's frame first loads. And this is for long form as well. But they also are going to show the just the creator, what is called, they're calling an engaged view, which is like the old school view. And, you know, I would argue that they're doing this to avoid any lawsuit. Because there was a lawsuit that a bunch of brands, you know, had against Facebook saying that they were falsifying the amount of views.

13:52Josh Cohen:And so YouTube can say, let's see, here's the real views. So what's happened as a result of this sort of new rollout? Some new stats coming out of Argentio, which touts itself as an AI native platform for creator advertising, empowering brands to scale, trust, performance, and revenue. So obviously, like their whole thing is helping sort of brands understand how to work with creators for the most part. So they looked at the view counts for more than 75 ,000 videos from its network of creators and found that on average, wait for it, only six out of 10 of public view counts also counted as engaged views.

14:24Josh Cohen:So you're talking about 40 % of the actual views versus engaged views were inflated, if my math does not fail me, which is anybody's guess. So this says that, you know, and what they said is this means public viewership is so far overstating actual meaningful engagement by an average of 1.67x. I mean, that's considerable, right? They found on average that public view counts are overstated by 85 % for microchannels specifically. So they define that as channels with less than 50k subs. And 49 % are for macrochannels, 300k subs or more. That's really bad news for micro creators, which we've been saying for a really long time is a subset of creators that it's like has very engaged audiences, right, potentially.

15:11So Josh, my question to you is that like, do brands see right through this?

15:16Josh Cohen:Do creators care? Lauren, I think brands do obviously care a lot about this. They want their dollars that they're putting towards creators to go to actual viewership that's taking place on the platform and not just the first frame of the video being seen. That being said, at least initially, not all these brands are going to be aware of this change. and I also think psychologically, regardless of whether they are or aren't, again, humans like big number go up. And so even if I go to you, Lauren Schnipper, and I say, I'm this big brand Fortune 100 company that wants to put money on to your YouTube videos and work with you, and you tell me your engaged views are 500 ,000 views per video, but your regular views are a million views per video, I still feel like that million views per video number is in my calculus somewhere, like consciously or subconsciously, I feel like it plays a factor and a role.

16:07Josh Cohen:It's so interesting because I'm just like, they're literally saying this is a garbage number. Yes. They're not hiding it. They're like, this is a garbage number. This is not the real number. Creator, we will tell you your real number so you can share it with a brand. And I guess the question is because the creator only sees it like, right? Like brands are going to have to demand seeing that engaged view. They're going to have to know to ask that question. And, you know, smaller potential like CPG brands might not know, they might not work with a big agency who will have that information and tell them.

16:36So I've been talking with a bunch of brands who sponsor creators on YouTube, who do these branded videos with creators on YouTube, who are also clients of Gospel Stats. And they've said they're basically discounting the views that they see by around 50%. Right. And then they're basing their deals on that number. And if the creator then wants to come back to them with a better number than that, sure, fine, we'll adjust accordingly. But that's at least what they're starting out as a 50 % discount on the views they see on the publicly available view counts on YouTube.

17:07Josh Cohen:So, yeah, I mean, generally speaking, I think that it's always better to under promise and over deliver. And I especially in this scenario, like if you're working with a brand who really doesn't know the difference. I think creators like to get paid no matter what. And they're fine. Lots of them. If they're under delivering, then you're never going to you're never going to work with a brand. again, right? Totally. 100%. So then that's like really dumb. It's not all creators, but I think like a decent amount of creators out there are fine just getting paid. I do think what's interesting here is, Lauren, you said that according to the Gentio study, it was kind of most egregious, this inflated view count on the micro creator side.

17:42And that's what we've seen at TubeFilter too. We produce these TubeFilter charts every week where we talk about the most view, the most subscribed YouTube channels on the platform. And what was interesting is for this last week, I was expecting there to be a huge uptick in the views. So, for instance, if you go back and you look at T-Series and what their numbers were at the first full week of August, they netted over just north of 1 billion views, 1.029 billion views on the week. If you look at their numbers for the first full week in September after this change was put into effect, they got 930 million views.

18:17So it's a decrease, actually. you know, that fluctuates. That's within the band of their normal kind of fluctuation from week to week. But it wasn't this huge, monstrous uptick in view counts that you saw. So I think maybe these big creators were getting massive view counts already. Maybe this is just an anomaly with some of the numbers in the first week since this came out. It'll be interesting to track this as this goes along. But then one other data point I do have is another one from Gospel Stats, where we're seeing about 5 ,000 to 6 ,000 sponsored videos, discovering 5 ,000 to 6 ,000 sponsored videos on YouTube any given week.

18:58In order for a video to go through our sponsorship identification process, it needs to get 25 ,000 views within the first seven days of upload. Now, in the first week since this viewership change, we haven't changed our viewership threshold. so just more videos are going into the kind of pipeline uh there was 8 500 sponsored videos so about a 45 percent or so increase in the quantity of sponsored videos on the platform

19:27Josh Cohen:because they're getting more views that's a lot that's a lot it's a lot it's a lot i think we need some more data to come back a little more data but like because you give me one set of data you're like this isn't changing anything there's a lot okay i think it depends on how big the creators are, how many views they're already getting. And I think we need to just give it a little more time to play out. And I do obviously think this is just going to have to make people on all sides of these influencer marketing and creator deals a little bit more diligent in their discovery process and understanding of how this ecosystem works and the creators that they want.

19:57Josh Cohen:And reporting, you know? So yeah, it's just fascinating. It's just fascinating. I'm just trying to think of an analogy of like something that like, you know, is fake. Like it's like, it's like I'm thinking about Dolly Parton because she's all these I keep getting the she's talking about she's not really blonde like you're you mad about dumb blonde jokes and she's like I'm not really blonde and I'm not done it's like we all know that she's not blonde but like we don't care so it's like we all know that these views aren't real but we don't care like I just like kind of I can't really like find a place in my head where like I believe this I think it's just that like we're gonna just forget after a while yeah this isn't real it's just marketing we're just gonna forget this is marketing and I do think part of the reason YouTube wanted to do it is to incentivize these smaller creators who are getting the vast majority of these views.

20:40Because again, if I'm posting videos and they get thousands of views instead of hundreds of views, I'm more likely to post some more, even though I know it's not real.

20:48Josh Cohen:100%. No, obviously. Well, along those lines, YouTube has started this new kind of co-viewing count that it's a metric also creators can only see. So the new metric is basically like if a household of three says on a sofa and watches one video on one television until last week youtube's analytics recorded this as a single view and as of september 5th it can record it as three but only in a report that the creator sees and nobody else can check so again it's like an engaged viewership how do they do how do they do that joshua i don't understand i think for first off like nielsen's been doing this for decades estimating how many people are actually watching videos.

21:31Josh Cohen:So it's more just like estimating who's in the household and then just that what we're doing. Right. So YouTube wants to be television. So I think it's applying more of these television accounting numbers to the different types of metrics it has. And it does. I think it should. It totally should. If YouTube's being viewed more on television screens now than ever before and there's multiple people watching those television screens, those views should count for more than a regular view that I'm watching on my mobile app or on my computer. Sure. And I think it does that because YouTube has a lot of information about everybody through its relationship with Google and more where it can just infer how many people in your household, what type of program it is, who might be watching and more.

22:14Josh Cohen:I mean, because I just assumed it would have some more exact science to this, but maybe you're right. Maybe it is that. I don't know. And what a bit of a sad download, Amelia de Moldenberg is, she's saying goodbye to Chicken Shop Date. Are you a fan of Chicken Shop Date? Who isn't a fan of Chicken Shop Date? Lauren, we were giving Chicken Chop Date streaming awards back in like pre-pandemic era. Tell me more about you and your discovery mechanisms, both you personally and the gospel that you built. Tell me more. So I think we were the first people to ever really honor or recognize Amelia de Moldenburg.