Starting March 31, 2025, YouTube will change how it counts views on Shorts. Previously, a view required a few seconds of watch time. Now a view will be counted the moment a Short begins to play.
When Shorts launched four and half years ago, nobody really knew how views were counted. On the main app, a view means someone has watched your video for at least 30 seconds. Of course that was too long for the Shorts format, so YouTube decided a view would require “a few seconds” of watch time, without ever defining how many seconds that actually was.
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The new approach, counting a view as soon as a Shorts begins to play, will be aligned with how platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok already count views.
For Creators, this means public view counts on Shorts are likely to increase. This also means it will be easier to compare with other platforms like Reels and TikTok.
However, to assess genuine engagement, YouTube is introducing ‘engaged views’ in YouTube Analytics, representing the previous view-counting method (of a few seconds.)
This is a really smart move as YouTube now positions itself to compete with TikTok and Reels, while keeping the notion of real engagement very much alive within the analytics, and hence proving its superior value to Creators, and brands (brands certainly love data, don’t they?)