TheQuartering [7/24/2023]
Updated March 11 to fix quote attribution and add another YouTuber’s comment and graph
Multiple YouTube creators are claiming that a YouTube bug is costing them between 50% to 90% of their income, both putting their future as video creators in doubt as well as seriously harming their economic wellbeing and even their ability to financially survive as video creators.
“It completely dropped,” says Hessel Broekstra, speaking about his YouTube ad revenue. “To get into numbers, I was hitting $100 days and it dropped down to like $6 days. So that is over 90% decrease, which is crazy.”
A YouTube creator who owns the Endpoint101 channel shared his YouTube analytics, also showing a steep drop in revenue. Revenue from skippable video ads “dropped through the floor” late last year and hasn’t recovered since, he says, even though views, impressions, and clickthroughs on his videos have remained the same or grown.
I recently spoke to five YouTube content creators and viewed a 62-page document with income graphs, video view statistics, and communications with YouTube support personnel from multiple others. Most say around the same thing: at or around November 16, 2022, revenue per thousand video views (RPM) dropped by 70-90% overnight.
YouTube employees have variously claimed it was a bug, or invalid traffic, or that it was fixed, and have deleted comments on YouTube creator forums, the YouTubers say.
For some channels revenue has since recovered, but for the majority it has not.
And that has at least one of the YouTubers I talked to wondering if he’ll need to get an old-fashion job to make real money.
“Right now I’m making like $30 a day,” says Bryan Talebi. “Right now it’s really hurting me.”
This is a near-repeat of a previous payment bug that I reported on in 2020. That bug cost some creators 50% or more of their revenue, and had serious financial as well as mental health implications on creators, one of who had a very significant and life-threatening breakdown as a result. YouTube blamed that revenue loss — which was also basically instant from one day where videos are earning money to the next day where they are not — on invalid traffic.
Invalid traffic, or IVT, is essentially fraud.
Invalid traffic is fake video views, and can happen if a YouTube channel owner buys video views for their channel from a shady source. More video views means more revenue, and views that appear to have a lot of views look more popular, so their owners are more likely to land lucrative sponsorship deals from brands. The only problem: these fake video views are a scam: they’re likely bots on a server farm simulating a human viewing a video, but no human is actually watching.
(One telltale sign of IVT when you’re on YouTube: videos that have thousands of views and no or very few likes.)
All of these creators swear that this is not the case.