YouTube, the world's most popular video-sharing platform, will soon change how it counts views after requests from content creators.
On Monday, YouTube, owned and operated by Alphabet, said that from August 24, views will be counted starting from whenever the video starts playing on any device.
Before the change, users had to linger on a video for a period of time before a view was counted.
While there is no previous official rule issued by YouTube, according to media outlets, if 30 seconds of a video was watched, that counted as a view.
But after YouTube Shorts was introduced, placing an emphasis on short-form vertical video content, YouTube started to count video impressions – or the number of times a video's thumbnail, post or advertisement appears on a user's screen – as views.
"Historically, we’ve used multiple view-counting systems across different formats," YouTube posted on its support blog on Monday.
"However, we’ve heard that creators want to eliminate this metric confusion and accurately understand their true exposure, which is why we’re making this update."
Standards for counting video views vary depending on the platform. Meta, owner of Facebook, requires that three seconds of a video be watched before a view is counted.
In recent years, content creators have sought to better explain to advertisers how many and what type of users view their content, and how wide their reach is. The amount of social and video platforms, coupled with different video-view tabulating methods, have complicated that task.
"We hope that having metric parity across all formats gives creators a clearer picture of their overall exposure and makes it easier to confidently express their true scale and value to brand partners and sponsors," YouTube said.
In YouTube's update, the company said certain analytics would not be changing amid the attempt to make things more consistent.
"We’ll keep the original view metric, called 'engaged views,' in YouTube Analytics via Advanced Mode so creators can see how many viewers choose to continue watching their video," the company said.
YouTube also said it did not expect the change to affect content creators’ earnings, which are based on an engagement metric.
Last week, the platform announced that starting on February 1, the threshold to earn money from ads and subscriptions will be 8,000 watch hours or 20 million views on Shorts within 90 days – almost double the current requirements.
