🚨Important thread: YouTube’s Home Feed UI Changes Negatively Impact Long-form Viewers (+Data) This year has been a tough year for many content creators, especially those making long-form content. And unlike many other years, the reason wasn’t that obvious. However, we finally found some data and started understanding what’s been happening. In this post, I want to highlight a problem that affects long-form creators. Important pre-note: since the last algorithm post, I’ve talked to the YouTube team. They’ve been open to conversation. That said, I believe in the importance of public awareness around these changes. Now, let’s talk about the important stuff. The UI Changes While we aren’t 100% certain about the full roll-out date of this update, and we believe it has been happening gradually, we do know that long-form creators are affected by changes to the browse feed. In the past, when you’d open your home page, you would see upwards of 6 long-form recommendations per row, often across two rows. (see first image) However, this has changed. In many cases, now only 2 long-form recommendations are shown, with the second row already taking up slots for short-form recommendations (see second image). Because of this, the ratio of long-form versus short-form often skews toward 2 long-form to 5 short-form recommendations on PC. This means that we're seeing a choice reduction of up to 80% long-form recommendation compared to previous home feeds. Note that you may see 3 videos being recommended, however, the first one being a sponsored post, I wouldn’t consider this as an organic long-form recommendation. Now, there are variations between non-premium and premium accounts, differences between device type and between accounts that predominantly watch long-form versus short-form content. But the overall change still affects a large portion of users. It’s very clear that this skews viewers’ attention toward short-form content. So what about the data? Finding data on this was incredibly hard. We don’t have access to the same kind of information as YouTube themselves, so take the following with a grain of salt. That said, we did manage to pull information from over 1,000 channels (thanks to some close friends of mine who don’t want to be named). What we found is that traffic for Shorts went up aggressively through browse features (see third image). At first glance, this sounds great. People are gaining rather than losing views, right? But those views, and that time spent, have to come from somewhere. While YouTube isn’t a zero-sum game, we do believe this signal indicates that the browse UI changes are having an impact somewhere else. We believe that these UI changes are slowly affecting long-form performance for creators, even if the drops aren’t very noticeable over a shorter period of time. The example I’ve added was the most extreme example of a person seeing a noticeable change in Shorts views coming from Browse without making significant changes to their content. So what can you do? Honestly, for you, as a creator, the only feasible option is to understand where the platform is at and create content accordingly. Follow what you’re incentivized to create. That said, I do believe that letting YouTube know about your concerns is important. Writing about it matters. I’m not very happy with these changes because I believe they are disproportionately favoring short-form content over long-form content, and this is dangerous for an ecosystem that heavily relies on long-form content for creator sustainability. And this is why I’m writing about this. Because creator sustainability often relies on resources created by content (income) and Short often does not generate enough resources to continue to create high-quality content. That’s why a lot of Shorts creators try to get into long-form. They are seeking that pathway to sustainability and resources to create better content. However, updates like these close that option for many, overall impacting the health of the creator economy. If you share my overall concern, then here’s my recommendation. YouTube has been reading these posts and seem to care about the opinions of creators. It’s important that we don’t turn this into a subjective “drama circle,” especially now that they’re actively showing interest in our concerns. However, it’s also important that we let ourselves be heard. My only ask is this: don’t be silent if this concerns you. My goal is to help feed you with information and potentially even the wording and reasoning to defend your concerns. One action I could ask you for is to respond to this post with your own concerns so it reaches more people and raises awareness. Responses can be about why you think this is good or bad for creators, how this change has affected you, or even a simple response, like, or share that helps it travel further. Hope you “enjoyed” this read.