🚨YouTube Analytics has just released a brand new metric: Unique Reach Previously, when trying to understand the success of a video, you would mainly focus on the total amount of views. However, this can easily give you the wrong idea of how many people were reached with this piece of content. Imagine you’re watching a piece of content, but you want to come back to it two more times at a later stage. YouTube will count this as a total of 3 views, while in reality it was only 1 unique viewer. Now imagine a different piece of content, but this time you’re watching it on your phone together with 2 other viewers. YouTube will count this as 1 view, while in reality it was 3 unique viewers. So what this new metric aims to do is figure out exactly how many people saw your content. The way YouTube predicts the number of viewers is based on factors like demographics, video genre, and even time of day. They’ll then validate their model against industry-standard measurements from partners like Nielsen to make sure accuracy stays high. The idea is that they’re trying to align with the way the traditional TV industry reports reach, which will make it easier to convince brands to sponsor content on the platform. Now, YouTube won’t show Unique Reach publicly. It’ll still show the original view metrics, but inside your analytics, you’ll be able to better understand how many people actually saw your content. But here’s my take. While it’s an amazing metric, I am concerned about the manner in which the number is being calculated. Companies like Nielsen are known to have biased findings in their data due to flaws in their measuring systems, and when these biases affect accuracy validation, you can start wondering how this could affect the Unique Reach metric. Nonetheless, it’s a very interesting new metric.

🚨Important thread: The YouTube algorithm actually changed, for the worse. (+Data) I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I should or shouldn’t address this publicly. I’ve already talked to some people within YouTube, but I don’t believe the word of a single person, meaning me, will be enough to encourage change. At least not quick change. Before I begin, a direct note to all my friends at YouTube, I truly respect what you’ve been doing in the past year, and I know you’ll take this problem seriously, but I’m also aware that you’ll often have your hands tied and there isn’t much you can personally do. I won’t reveal any sensitive information that people can’t find out by themselves. Let’s begin. A few months ago, creators of all sizes started noticing a significant change in the overall performance of their channels. Usually this is related to the overall behavior of audiences, however, this one felt different. It wasn’t just one or two channels, it was every single channel I was working on (and more). These are channels that pull 100 million to 1 billion views per month at times. At first, I was like: alright, let’s find out where we’re going wrong. Maybe we’re missing something. However, after weeks and months, no answers were found. This is very frustrating, not only for myself but also for the creators who are relying on these answers to maintain their channel, business and livelihood. But that’s when we made a breakthrough, a way of looking at data that we had missed. You see, this entire time we were analyzing the channel as a whole, new and old videos combined. However, we weren’t focused on isolating older content, specifically content with a publish date older than one month. That’s where, for the first time, we noticed something unusual. We saw a complete crash in short form views on content older than one month. (see image) What we found was that somewhere in the middle of September, YouTube had pushed a significant change in their short form algorithm which impacted nearly every short form creator across the platform. Why is this a problem? Because it affects every creator we all care about. It didn’t matter if you were a smaller creator or one of the top ten creators, we haven’t found many people who were spared. I’ll leave a brief explanation at the bottom so you can check your own channel. And these weren’t just entertainment or educational creators, it was both. What we found is that YouTube seems to have implemented a change that strongly prioritizes content uploaded in the last month, roughly 28 to 30 days, we’re still unsure. But what impact does this have, and why do I believe this is something that should be brought to light? The first impact is that we’re seeing a shift away from quality to quantity. Often, creators live off the revenue generated, not just Adsense, from these bigger content pieces. A strong portion of this revenue comes from their back catalog, meaning older content. With this change, you’re increasing the importance of high volume uploads in the first 30 days. What do I believe is happening, and why is this change going through? I believe there are two reasons why YouTube is pushing this change. First, to hit certain targets with Shorts. Plain simple, I don’t believe this is a “what’s best for the creator” type of play, it feels more like a “we want to compete with TikTok” type of play. Not unreasonable, even if the creator gets hurt by it short term. I’m just trying to think from a corporate point of view. The second reason, which I believe to be the actual leading reason, is a push for recency, freshness or novelty, whichever term they would choose to use. But if this is the reason, there’s a massive overcorrection happening. Some content needs that freshness: news, streaming highlights, medical information. However, this isn’t true for all types of content. Some content from years ago is just as good today. We have noticed that certain top content pieces, individual videos, still get a significant amount of views, so it looks more like prioritization than anything else. Regardless, while in private I find it fun to refer to this situation as “the flattening”, in reality this is a very concerning moment where simple ideas turn into a massive hit toward the creator economy. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of changes that have been affecting people. It’s important that changes on the platform aren’t just focused on the consumer, but the preservation of a healthy creator economy that allows creators to grow their business, teams, and create better content. Without a focus on both the creator and the consumer, you’ll quickly run into an issue of low quality slop that makes people want to go elsewhere. If there’s any call to action here for you, whether you’re a creator or a viewer, I strongly encourage you to leave your thoughts here to encourage YouTube to rethink this decision, or at least optimize it so that it’s also regarding the importance of keeping a healthy creator economy. Share your thoughts, and even data from your own channel, because this will be seen by people who have the power to make change. Disclaimer: I’ve left out some sensitive information. However, if you want to check this for yourself, go to Analytics, click on Advanced Mode, filter by Content Type (Shorts), filter by Publish Date (for example any short published from Jan 2025 to Jun 2025), set the data to Last 365 Days and take a look at the change happening around September. I think you can imagine why it took so long for us to find out where the issue began. Thanks for reading this post.