Jeff Geerling Shocked to Discover Many Metrics in YouTube Are Fake (His Audience Turns Out to be Much Smaller)
Maybe self-host all videos, don't rely on Google's "FOMO" cheating (addiction based on false assumptions)
Mr. Geerling does all sorts of cool things, but Geerling is also known for an Apple fetish, Microsoft GitHub, and Google YouTube (i.e. GAFAM). Freedom advocate? Only to some extent.
He cannot safely criticise companies like Google in his "channel", where he's just a tenant of Google. To him, Alphabet is landlord and boss.
Will Geerling finally cross the river and join us in the "freedom camp"? One can hope.
1.5 months ago we published "YouTube is a Spamfarm, Slopfarm, and Clickfarm (a Lot of Numbers There Are Fake)" and cited some obvious examples. The Linux Foundation, for instance, is selling clickfraud in YouTube.
Now Geerling admits something he'd rather not believe (but now it is becoming publicly apparent):
For many creators, especially those who have multiple employees, debts to pay channel expenses, etc., a downturn in views could spell doom. Especially if sponsorship deals they rely on are tied to metrics like 'views per 24h' or 'views over 30/60/90 days'.As an industry, marketing firms have mostly untied subscriber counts from ad spend decisions, since subscribers are less an indicator of channel health. Maybe this is an indication they need to adjust expectations when it comes to views as well...
Many readers of this blog think all this stuff is hogwash and meaningless anyway (the Internet was better before it was all monetized!), but it is nice to earn an income and get paid for the work I do, in the form of YouTube AdSense.
I, of course, don't begrudge anyone for ad blocking. And I offer all my videos in full 4K resolution downloads on Floatplane—some viewers even integrate it automatially with Plex or Jellyfin, and skip YouTube entirely! I've even considered experimenting with PeerTube, but I'm not sure whether I'll test those waters or not.
In the end, whether you like modern YouTube or not, it view counts are down, possibly for Shorts as well (I only post one or two shorts a month, so have less data to go on there), but it's not clear why.
See what we wrote this morning about this FOMO addiction: "Social Control Media Sites Have Become Bot Farms (Not Limited to LLMs and Automation)"
As we said earlier this month, in the case of Clickfraud Spamnil it's apparent that over 95% of his "views" are fake (bots) and he's selling "B2B" junk based on this clickfraud.
Many "vloggers" or "YouTubers" or "influencers" are snakeoil vendors not much better than "crypto bros".
"I saw Jeff's blog post," one person told us. "He had one idea for a possible explanation, but still does not self-host like he should."
He talked about this before, but he's not doing it. █