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- YouTube Redefines the View
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YouTube Redefines the View
The Hollywood Reporter has a good writeup on YouTube’s recent change to what it considers a view on a video:
…As of Monday, YouTube has changed how it counts public views of videos. The platform’s previous definition of 30 seconds is being replaced by views that “will be counted the moment a video begins to play — from the very first frame,” YouTube noted in an update last week.
…The change will align YouTube with the way platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X count their video views. It also eliminates a dual system where longer YouTube videos and YouTube Shorts were measured differently.
As THR goes on to note, these changes do not impact what gets counted as engaged viewing, information crucial to advertisers and YouTubers themselves:
Creators still need to have at least a thousand subscribers and a threshold of “qualified” views (for YouTube Shorts) or watch hours (for longer videos) to qualify for YouTube’s partner program. Earnings, in turn, are based on what YouTube calls engaged Shorts views or engaged watch hours. That metric counts viewers who stick around after the first few seconds of a video (not including loops).
OK, so what’s the point in doing this, if the monetization numbers aren’t really changing?
The purpose is this: changing the nature of what is considered a view transfers significant power over to YouTube’s algorithm. When a view simply means “someone saw a frame of this video,” you can point your algorithm directly at content you favor in order to claim it as popular. Just ask Twitter owner Elon Musk!
For instance, let’s take a look at the YouTube channel of The Free Press, the online media company recently purchased by Paramount Skydance for $150 million. Hearing that number, you would think “Wow! This must be a tremendously popular media brand!” and then you visit their YouTube page, which has less than half a million subscribers and video plays that occasionally top off at 100k and bottom out as badly as 14k. Just as a point of comparison, this is a worse per-video performance than the YouTube channel Chef Reactions, the content of which is one guy watching people make horrible recipes.
This is an embarrassing state of affairs for media oligarchs like the Ellisons, and so Google is making it much easier to obscure the relative popularity of content online to the general public (but not to advertisers).
Why DO Movies Look Like That Now?
Big props to The AV Club for finally trying to answer the question often asked by audiences and the folks on Film Twitter: why do movies all look like that now?
Felipe Vara de Rey describes the contemporary look as “desaturated, low contrast, a little dull,” Rikki Porter says she’s seen “a more flattened look across the board,” Tara Violet Niami says that movies lately have a “super low-contrast, desaturated look that’s lit softly but [with] directionless lighting,” and camera operator Joe Brady says he had been seeing images where “the contrast ratios are very slim [and] there’s no detail in the shadows or in a really overexposed highlight.”
What these technicians describe is partially the product of what’s happening on set, but is more emblematic of the temperature of the film industry. As de Ray explains, there’s simply less time. “We have to shoot movies that we used to shoot in 42 days, [now] we have to shoot them in 28, so we sacrifice polishing the look,” he says. “We sacrifice budget on lights and electrical crews, because with the modern sensors, the dynamic range, the sensitivity, we can shoot something and fine-tune it and polish it in post.”
Check out the full article, tons of interesting insight from lots of people working in the business and a not-at-all surprising villain that you’ll never be able to guess (the streamers).
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
Horror-comedy cinematography on a $1.2 million budget. (link)
Amazon and Roku are getting ready to release new streaming devices. (link)
Google held liable for false statements made by its AI model. (link)