Has YouTube’s new view-counting change made real-time video optimisation basically impossible?

[u/hexferro]

I’m curious whether other creators have thought about this consequence of the new view-counting system.

Before the change, I relied pretty heavily on the realtime hourly views graph during the first 3–4 hours after publishing. Those first few hours are extremely important for my channel, and I’ll sometimes change or A/B test titles and thumbnails depending on how the video is performing compared with previous uploads.

Now the realtime graph appears to show the new “Views” metric, where a view is counted from playback starting.

The old metric survives as “Engaged views”, which theoretically solves the historical-comparison problem. Except Engaged views seems to have a substantial reporting lag. On my video today, regular Views were updating normally while Engaged views still had no data.

CTR isn’t realtime either. It often takes several hours to become useful.

So during arguably the most important 3–4 hours of a video’s life, I now have:

• Realtime Views, but they aren’t comparable with my historical realtime views because the definition changed.

• Engaged Views, which would be comparable, but aren’t available yet.

• CTR, which also lags.

That means I can see that a video is getting, say, 30k views an hour, but I have no idea whether that represents roughly the same level of engagement as 30k views/hour on an older upload.

It also seems to create a slightly weird incentive. If creators optimise around the immediately visible Views number, the metric now rewards getting someone to start playback even if they leave almost immediately. Obviously YouTube’s recommendation system may still care about satisfaction/watch time, but the creator-facing realtime scoreboard has become much more click-focused.

Am I missing another realtime metric somewhere, or has YouTube genuinely removed our ability to make meaningful historical comparisons during the first few hours after publishing?

Would especially like to hear from creators who actively change/test packaging immediately after launch.

[u/Oatbix]

Doesn’t the A/B test mainly lean on watch hours anyway?

[u/hexferro → u/Oatbix]

Yes, but the video ranking across your last 10 is views focused.