this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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For those curious what “adblockers said really happened”:
OK. I mean Fuck Alphabet anyhow, but this means a youtuber who relies on view counts for monetary income (I guess) would actually have reason to worry about adblockers?
Again, I'm not saying I'm against adblockers or even this particular feature. And I very well see what Google is doing here, trying to get their creators up in arms against adblocking. I just want to know if this is debunkable or if youtubers would have a genuine argument here.
I did not really understand above explanation. I guess I need it ELI5.
I kept up with the drama until about a week ago so what I'm saying here is the status from back then. Someone please add any new context if I'm missing any new developments:
From what it appeared, view counts dropped but ad revenue stayed the same. Even before this whole thing, YouTube pays out for ads watched (and clicked). Pay out was not dependent on raw view count for a long time, if ever.
This suspicious behavior of view count dropping but ad revenue staying the same is actually what tipped people off that the issue was adblock related. The fact that channels with a larger focus on a younger audience seeing less of a drop also helped.
Now those view counts dropping could still have an indirect, negative effect on ad revenue, if it, e.g. automatically leads to YouTube recommending their videos less prominently.
Reported view counts are also important for sponsorships as sponsored video payouts are often tied to hitting specific view counts, and even getting sponsorships and their rates are also typically conditional on view counts. So yes, even though it doesn't directly impact ad revenue it still directly impacts total channel revenue for anyone that accepts sponsorships.
All that said, Google caused this entire mess by bundling their view counting in with their telemetry. If they just reported the raw download stats for the streams instead of trying to determine every last detail of who is watching the video (for all that juicy advertising data) this problem wouldn't have happened in the first place.