Transcription
If your views have dropped significantly and you have no clue why, this video is going to explain exactly what happened. I've been doing a stupid amount of research for like literally the last week and a half, 2 weeks, almost all day, every day to actually f and finally really get to the bottom of this because the truth is YouTube completely changed the rules and most creators have no idea that it even happened.
In fact, since August of 2025, creators across every single niche have really reported almost a 30 to even 50% drop in views almost overnight. That's crazy. Like, that's insane. Talking about big channels, small channels, established creators with years of of consistency and reps put in, all of them just got hit at the exact same time.
And here's the thing that makes really all this just super brutal. YouTube never announced it at all. There was no email. There was no update. There was no explanation, no articles released, nothing. And that's why I decided to make this video. In this video, I'm going to break down exactly what caused this this crisis. I'm going to be diving into four specific technical reasons that your channel is being suppressed right now, including my own channel. And I'm going to be showing you what you can actually do about each one.
Now, this video is going to be less edited than normal and feel more like a newsroom, but it's really important that I get this across to all of you. All right, so I got my trusty research here to make sure that everything is accurate. However, before we jump into this, if you're somebody who's serious about growing on YouTube and growing your channel and actually even being able to make money from it as well, I have a completely free community-based program. It has weekly trainings, templates, Q&As's. You get the whole nine yards. So, if you care about growing on YouTube and making money with it, it's completely free. You could click the first link in the description below. All right, let's jump into it.
All right, so first things first, I want to just validate what you're feeling because I thought I was going crazy at first. You are not imagining this. Creators like Skill Up, Jacob Geller, uh even Lionus Tech Tips, these are major channels with millions of subscribers, and they all reported the exact same thing. Views are falling off of a cliff. And it all happened around the same time. And this date is important. We're going to go back to it. But basically, it all happened on August 13th, 2025 for all of these channels. And listen, when you have multiple creators across completely different niches experience the same drop on the same day, that's not a coincidence. That's a platform update. That's something fundamentally shifting behind the scenes. So, the question is, what actually changed? And after stupid amounts of research, there are really four main things. And I want you to understand all four because each one is really hitting your channel in a different way.
All right. Now, this first one's probably the one that actually shocked me the most uh that made me the most disappointed. And it may not sound super important, but it is. YouTube is now using AI to estimate the age range of your viewers. Now, this information isn't based on what the user told YouTube, okay? When you fill out your settings or any of that. It's based on what they watch, their viewing history, their behavior on the platform. And if the AI decides that a viewer might be under 18 or if they're in what YouTube calls a restricted mode, which is basically environments like a school network or or a library or a parentally controlled device or something along that those lines, right? If that's the case, your video gets hidden from them completely. Okay? Not age restricted, not flagged, just invisible.
Now, what I find extremely frustrating about this is you get zero notifications when this happens. You don't even know. In fact, when I was doing research, I came across a creator called Josh Strife Hayes who actually documented this whole thing. So, he went through this the last 30 videos and found that 14 of his 30, nearly half were hidden in restricted mode. None of them violated any YouTube's any of YouTube's policies. None of them were age restricted in YouTube Studio. They were just invisible. They were gone from the entire pool of viewers. And this leads to a much bigger issue affecting all of us. But we'll get to that soon cuz I first need to continue covering this. I want you to think about how many people watch YouTube on, I don't know, like a school Wi-Fi network or on a work device or on their tablet that their kid uses or the opposite. For example, my own son, he uses my YouTube account to watch Blippy, a kid creator. So, that's not a small audience segment. This makes up potentially millions of views that your content will never reach and you'd have you'd have absolutely no idea because the AI misreading your age. So, that's the first hit. your content is being filtered from audiences that you can't even see. So frustrating.
Now the second reason is about how YouTube is measuring success right now. Okay? And it sadly comes from shorts. So basically in the shorts feed, YouTube tracks something called swipe away ratio. Basically what this means is did somebody watch your video for more than a second or two or did they immediately swipe past it? Okay, if they swipe away, that's a very, really massive negative signal to the algorithm. It tells YouTube that your content didn't catch attention fast enough. So, obviously, they're not going to be incentivized to push it more. But here's where this gets really important for long form creators like myself and likely you. That swipe culture, if you will, is now bleeding into regular videos. YouTube's recommendation engine is increasingly treating slower intros or hooks on long- form content the same way that it treats a swipe away short. So, if your first 10 to 15 seconds don't hook the viewer, the algorithm will just start pulling back on distribution. And it'll do it fast. And then on top of that, back in March of 2025, YouTube changed how it counts views on shorts. So now, every time your short starts playing or loops, it counts as a view on the surface. but only what they call engaged views, okay? Where someone actually watches past a few seconds. Those people, the people who actually watch past a few seconds, that's what counts towards revenue or your channel's actual health metrics. So, your headline view count might look okay, right? You might getting be getting a lot more views than you think on the surface with short form content, but your real engagement, that's what the algorithm is actually watching and cares about. So, if it if yours is weak, your video is going to stop getting pushed. All this to say that this is why the same intro style that worked 2 years ago just isn't working anymore. The bar for immediate attention has just gone up a few brackets. Actually, quite dramatically. Okay.
Now, the third reason is one of the most technical, maybe even boring, but it also the most controversial. It's one that I had to research probably the most because it was mainly speculation for the longest amount of time out of any of these. And I actually wasn't going to add it in this video because it was mainly uh speculation. But as I was scraping through documents, I found proof from YouTube that this is actually not just speculation. So basically in August of 2025 ad blocker tools, things like uh Ublock or Easy List, doesn't really matter. They pushed out a filter update. Okay, that's what matters. And that filter update accidentally blocked YouTube's tracking requests. Now, it's those tracking requests that are the things that count your views. So, what happened was people were still watching your videos. The watch time was still happening, but the ping back to YouTube servers that actually records the the view count, it was gone. And this is why so many creators saw desktop specific views drop by like 50% while their ad revenue stayed basically the same. like Lionus Tech Tips, his ad revenue stayed the same one month, but his views were 50% down. I want you to think about that for a second, okay? Revenue stayed stable, but views dropped. That makes no sense unless the views were never actually being counted in the first place. And desktop is where ad bloggers are most common. So, you lost visibility into a massive portion of your actual audience because I don't know about you, but most of my viewers are on desktop. And something that almost nobody's talking about is the fact that YouTube finally acknowledged this, but they did it very low-key. So, they put out a statement saying that ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts and that the channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users with these tools may see more fluctuations in traffic. That's YouTube admitting it. Now, they initially said that there was no like systematic error or anything of that nature. Then they quietly very low-key confirmed exactly what the ad blocker community had already found, which was what we just mentioned. Now, most of these filter rules were basically corrected uh by September 2025, but the war between YouTube and ad blockers is still ongoing, and any new update to these tools can cause another round of the exact same distribution issue. So, you might wonder, what in the world does this mean practically for us? Well, it means that your real reach is probably higher than what YouTube Studio is showing you. It just means the metrics are broken. But I also want you guys to really take that with a grain of salt. Okay? I want you to understand that this is less so the case now and more so was the case. And I also want you to have the self-awareness to know whether your content is actually good or not. And try avoiding using this as an excuse of underperforming videos, which is why I was very skeptical to put this point in here.
Okay, so this fourth and final one is the one that's by far the most important, most impactful, and the one that's going to change how you think about every single video you make from this point forward. And I want to be extremely clear before I get into this. This isn't a theory. Google has literally a patent on it, okay? It's something called information gain. And the simple version of uh of what information gain means is essentially YouTube's AI reads your video's transcript and it compares what you're saying against everything that already exists on that topic that you're talking about across the entire landscape of YouTube. And then it asks one question. Does this video contribute something new or is it just another video saying the same thing that's already been said a thousand times?
Now, the reason they put this in place is because the increase of creators, millions of creators, new creators every single week are coming on the platform creating AI slop. It's creating more noise in an already noisy world or atmosphere. And this AI system that they've implemented al ultimately is a net positive in my opinion because it forces us to stop echoing what everyone else is saying and actually come out with good content, unique content. So Google's own patent, they described it basically as measuring the additional information in a piece of content beyond what a viewer has already been exposed to. So think about what that means for your channel. If you make a video on a topic that's already been covered extensively and your take doesn't really bring anything new to the table, the algorithm identifies that and it views it as just more noise. It knows. So, it's going to limit how far it pushes that content specifically to new viewers, people who've never seen you before because those people have already likely been exposed to that information that you're just echoing somewhere else, probably from a bigger creator. Your existing subscribers, they may still watch, they already trust you, but the algorithm won't push it out to a wide net of a cold to new audience, especially if it calculates that those people would gain practically nothing from watching it. Because you have to remember YouTube is a business with business goals and their business goals are to keep people on their platform for longer.
Now, just to give you an example of this, if you watched a video on how to grow on YouTube in 2026 by, let's say, Think Media, and then I post something similar, maybe a similar video, well, it likely won't be showed to you if you are not subscribed to me. If you're a new audience and you have already watched the Think Media video, and this explains something that a lot of creators have just been confused by. You post a video, it gets off to a decent start. Your core audience watches it, right? And then boom, it just stops. It plateaus dead. It doesn't grow past your existing viewer base at all. Well, that, my friends, that's the information gain filter just doing its job.
So, what does this mean for how you create content going forward? Because it does matter. It does impact it. The channels that are still growing right now, they're not just making better videos. better is no longer the the input that we can put in in order to have an exponentially larger output or stand out more. Okay? No, the creators who are actually doing well now in this new landscape, they're making videos that contain information that doesn't exist anywhere else yet, personal results, original frameworks, data they actually collected, like me making this video. Or maybe it's experiments they ran. Or maybe it's insider knowledge on how to do something specific that's brand new that nobody else knows how to do yet. Which is why you've maybe seen by like a creator Nick. He created a 4 and 1/2 hour long pretty boring course that he posted on YouTube about how to master Claude Code right when Claude Code came out and the video did over half a million views, right? And there was almost no editing in it. Well, it's because he was he he he he was breaking free from the noise and he was talking about a topic that just didn't exist yet on on the platform in such depth with so much value. I personally like to think about it like this. You aren't just competing with other creators in your niche anymore. You are now officially competing with the entire archive, the entire past of content that exists on that topic. And if what you're saying isn't adding to that archive, if it's just repeating it, echoing it, YouTube's going to treat your video like a rerun, honestly.
So, the question that you need to ask before you film anything now isn't just, "Is this a good idea?" It's, "What does this video add that isn't already out there? What's the angle only I can bring? What did I personally test that's new? What did I experience that's different? Or what did I figure out that makes this video genuinely new?" really the the name of the game right now is competition, right? This is why I use a tool. I'm not even sponsored by them. I just absolutely love the tool and I'm really good friends with Marcus Jones. He's an awesome dude. He's the creator of Velo. It's a YouTube research tool and basically inside of there when you do ideation, they have a new trending feature where you can see outliers and then you could see the competition of that. So, for example, my editor is currently editing a video that's a massive outlier in my space on a trending topic that it has zero other videos made on it right now, only the one, which means that video is probably going to do really well for me. Whereas, maybe if I saw another video that was an outlier, like how to grow on YouTube in 2026, it's an outlier, but it's oversaturated with tons of competition. Every other creator has made it. So likely with this uh new Google patent, the AI is going to see that and it's going to suppress my video. This is why I use the tool Velo. I have a personal affiliate link, totally transparent with that. It'll be down below. Uh I highly, highly recommend you use it. So in 2026, this is going to be your edge. This is going to be how you go about distribution.
Now, this was a lot right here. Um I'm pretty proud of myself. I only looked down at my notes a couple times and I'm pretty sure everything was accurate. But with that being said, let's basically put all of this now together. You've got invisible filtering cutting off your videos from a huge chunk of your potential audience. Honestly, that one frustrates me the most. Next, you've got a completely new retention standard where the first few seconds matter more than they ever have in the past. Three, you've got broken analytics hiding your real reach from you. Take that with a grain of salt. it varies from person to person and it also varies on your demographics and the uh way that they're viewing your content and also it's less the case now but I still wanted to add it in because it still does affect some people and honestly the most most most important one number four you've gotten an AI system now evaluating whether your content actually deserves to be distributed to new people. I personally do like this one because it means we just have to be more original. And I think that this is ultimately a net positive call for YouTube to roll out as long as the AI proves that it's accurate. Because something that has worried me as a creator is the increase of AI and AI slop and basically burying genuinely good content because just the oversaturation of just the sheer amount of content. So I personally do like this last one. And just to recap, assuming this AI continues to work well, it decides whether your video will continue to get pushed or not based on whether it really adds something genuinely new to the internet, to YouTube. And all of this, all of these four reasons, that is why it feels like YouTube's on hard mode, cuz it is on hard mode. YouTube got significantly harder to grow all at the same time without telling anybody. And the creators who are going to win from here on are the ones who actually understand what's happening. Which again, sorry to do another plug, is why you should join my completely free YouTube growth community. First link in the description below, because I make sure inside everyone in there stays up to date.
But overall, here's what I want you to walk away with right now. Number one, your hook is even more important than it ever used to be. Not the first 30 to 90 seconds. I'm talking about the first 10, maybe even 5 seconds. If you're still starting videos with slow buildups or long intros, you are getting penalized in the current landscape, the current algorithm. So, tighten your hooks. Lead with the most compelling thing immediately. Number two, stop obsessing over total view count. That number right now is a little bit unreliable. Watch time, engage views, subscriber conversion rates. Those are the metrics that tell you if the algorithm is actually trusting your content. Honestly, even more so if you have an offer in place. I track my revenue, how much I make per video with the third party platform. And that also allows me to see which videos are performing really well in terms of revenue in versus just audience metrics. Number three, go through your content, your recent videos, and manually check them in in restricted mode from a separate browser. So if you are on Google Chrome, go to Safari and try it there. Because when you do this, you might find out that a significant portion of your your channel's like catalogs of videos is invisible to a massive audience segment. And then number four, and this, as I already said, guys, is the big one, honestly, the most important or most impactful of them all. Start genuinely asking yourself every single video you make, what does this ad that doesn't already exist? What's the information gain here? Is it your personal story building a personal brand? Is it your test results on a certain thing? Is it your original framework? Is it your take that no one else has? That's what gets distributed in 2026. That's what breaks through. It's exactly why my last video where I talked about a variation of a YouTube strategy did super poor in terms of performance. And it's also why the videos where I uniquely break down the strategy of existing creators like Ryan Treyan, Mr. Beast, or even the YouTube CEO, they get hundreds of thousands of views on my channel, right? Because they're unique. They're my own exploration, investigation. It's also why I see most of the people with hundreds of thousands and millions of views right now. Mo, one of the largest formats that I see happening where they're getting those are challenges or experiments or investigations. Think Johnny Harris. Think I mean just last night I saw a video with 3 million views. It was like I tried to start a drop shipping store with only using AI and it's like a it follows along with him over 7 days as he does that. That's the stuff that's unique. Nobody else can replicate that. Exactly.
So, I want you to understand hard mode isn't the end. It's just a filter. The creators who adapt are the ones who come out on the other side ahead of everyone who gave up. So, don't get left behind. And I know this was long. If this video did help you understand what's actually been going on with your channel, cuz I couldn't figure it out myself, which is why I just decided to take matters in my own own hands and do so much research. Well, if that's the case, then I'm genuinely happy that I could provide you with the value that I couldn't find. And I recommend it. If you want to continue that trend of receiving value, you go and you watch this video next where I basically break down the ideation strategy that's working on YouTube right now. Otherwise, I hope you guys have a fantastic day and I also hope to see you guys in my free community. See you in the next one. Peace.