A lot of Youtube channels are reporting declining viewership lately.
EX1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpVnx4_yqTo
EX2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0tmhEtVJE
Fun times. Looks like a lot of channels are seeing a decline not just Linus. Hes just the latest to talk about it.
Then I saw this article as well and thought I would share.
Anyone here youtube creators? Are you seeing the same thing, a general downturn in viewership?
LLMs are doing things like summarizing videos and then using the summaries to answer queries that before would have been a search result with monetization.
Google’s executives are unconcerned about the declinibg incentives to create YouTube videos having been sold on the lie that the future of the internet lies in Ai generated content. In other words robots will make the internet.
Robots which hallucinate constantly.
This hurts review channels and similar but it wouldn’t hurt other kinds of video (unless people want summaries of fun videos?)
Even fun videos get search traffic from random queries. A video about robots fighting each other will get traffic from people interested in “robots fighting”, “robots wars”, “robowars”, “armored core”, “Gundam series”
When there are ai summaries for informational or navigational queries there will be fewer clicks because Google will pirate listicle sources of “best robots fighting each other articles”. This means they are stealing from older lists and newer videos will not get mentioned in the ai summary.
This is because ai technology can’t judge the quality of a video.
Remember when search summaries were just extracts from the top result instead of LLM hallucinations? Pepperidge Farm remembers.