James Delahunty
26 Jun 2018 6:04
YouTubers have used VidCon to vent their frustration at YouTube over declining viewership due to subscribers not being notified of new videos.
Starting last year, many YouTubers began to notice their average number of video views falling dramatically. It emerged that YouTube wasn't notifying their subscribers as often about new videos, and wasn't promoting them to subscribers as prominently as before.
Some of the drops were significantly steep. King Russell, who goes by the YouTube name "Kingsley", counts three million YouTube followers. He noticed that his views per video declines to around 100,000, compared to over one million per video in the previous years.
"It's unacceptable," he said, reports Reuters. "It's tacky, rude and needs to change."
YouTube justifies its actions by explaining that YouTube viewers can become overwhelmed by too many alerts, but YouTubers remain unconvinced. Many videomakers have resorted to asking their subscribers to click/press the "bell" notification button beside the subscribe button to get more notifications. In theory, this should result in a user being notified of ever video upload, but some viewers claim this doesn't always happen either.
In the past few years, YouTube has also been accused of targeting conservative or right-leaning videos for demonetization, which prevents videomakers from generating ad revenue on the content.