461
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by mesamunefire@piefed.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] felipesoc@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago

I've noticed this in many of the channels I subscribe to, 5 years ago they had something like 1m views on some videos regularly and now only 300k (or similar decline), all of them. Some of them even made videos about it. My guess, and theirs, is YouTube changed the algorithm and also the introduction of shorts.

[-] smayonak@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] lorty@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 hours ago

This hurts review channels and similar but it wouldn't hurt other kinds of video (unless people want summaries of fun videos?)

[-] smayonak@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

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.

[-] kieron115@startrek.website 4 points 1 day ago

Remember when search summaries were just extracts from the top result instead of LLM hallucinations? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
461 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

74890 readers
2813 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS