YouTube changes how “views” are calculated

• A week after YouTube altered the numbers you need before you start making money, YouTube’s visible definition of a “play” (or “view”) is also to change. From August 24, a public view will be counted “the moment a video begins to play from the very first frame”.

  • Creators still have access to “engaged views”, which YouTube publicly says is “how many times viewers stayed to watch past the first frame and initial seconds”. This is the previous definition of a play/view, believed by many to be at least 30 seconds (though YouTube doesn’t publicly say). If that’s true, the “engaged view” roughly aligns to the AMP Accords definition of a play.
  • So, what is a podcast play? We’ve written up a full article, with our own stats, to explain and compare the different platforms. Most - but not all - give a roughly consistent number.

• What will be the effect of YouTube’s new “view” metric? The public numbers will be significantly bigger, we’d guess - but also, significantly less meaningful, since a play for one second will still count. However, the more comparable “engaged views” metric will, as far as we can see, become entirely private to the creator: it won’t be seen on public pages, and it will not be available through the YouTube Public Data API. It remains accessible in YouTube Studio, and through the Analytics and Reporting APIs, for creators; but third-party rankers or data companies will no longer have access, unless they’re specifically given that.

• After we published a video of a podcast ad that was unskippable in Spotify yesterday, Spotify contacted us to say: “Spotify does not make podcast ads unskippable. A bug caused the 15-second skip to not be visible in the example, and it was fixed. The 15-second skip works for both Free and Premium users. Skip Ahead is a separate feature we are testing with a subset of Premium subscribers.” They’ve not commented on what their terms for creators could allow them to do.

• After a successful first year, The Podcast Study 2026 this year will focus on discovery, loyalty and monetization, it’s been announced. The first outing of the data will be at the Sounds Profitable Business Summit in NYC.

• Covatic, a company that helps audience targeting, has launched Smart Campaigns: a live campaign optimisation tool for publishers. The tool has delivered conversion-rate uplifts of up to 60%.

• They Pay for Water is a new book from Dan Murphy, one of the founding executives of XM Radio (now part of SiriusXM). It’s the story of “raising the money, building the satellites, designing the radios, and convincing a country that had never paid for radio to start paying ten dollars a month for it”.

People news

• Cheryl Brumley has started as Head of Podcasts at Bloomberg. Based in London, she joined from the Financial Times and The Economist.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement NYC

• On the main stage last year at Podcast Movement, Strategic Solutions and Point to Point revealed The Podcast Growth Study, with insights to use when promoting your next show. This year’s will be unveiled in NYC at the Sounds Profitable Business Summit.
• Stop asking people to donate, says Ralph Estep Jr. The word costs you money, and could be misleading, he suggests - and gives other words to use. He’s been a long-time supporter to Podnews (and we’ve never used the d-word).

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