ok, so i found a way to make sense of this without a conspiracy or a change in metrics or incompetence and i'll stop whining about it. i'm going to pin it on the autoplay and flashblock.

i'm clearly getting more traffic than is being recorded, but i think that must be something that was true all along and i'm only noticing it now because traffic spiked really high and then faded off a bit. if i take out that one 238 hit day as an anomaly, traffic for august is still up a bit (88 hits a day vs 86 hits a day in july). and if i take out some of the 180 hit days, it's up even more. i'm a mathematician, i know i should do that, and i'm getting ahead of myself in not doing it. jumping from 75 hits a day to 88 hits a day is actually still a big jump, once i've controlled for that.

but what that means is that i must have got something like 400 hits the day that 238 was recorded, if i'm working with a rough scaling factor of 200% on the lead track. that is, i'm thinking that roughly 40% of users are blocking autoplay in some way. on firefox, you can use flashblock. there's a similar built-in fix with both chrome and explorer, and an html5 fix if you're not using flash at all.

so, i'm no longer thinking they changed it or that i'm being throttled or anything of the sort, i'm concluding that i've been being undercounted the whole time and that the number of people using flash blocking software is highly variable. so, i can stop moaning about it, now - it's been constant the whole time, and applicable to everybody equally.

the takeaway is to encourage people to use some kind of flash-blocking software to disable the autoplay. this will help anybody with a trailer up on their page, but it will especially help musicians that have converted youtube into an advertising platform get an accurate hit count.

to be honest, i couldn't imagine trying to browse without a flash-blocker. it would drive me nuts. ads popping up, videos playing everywhere - total mayhem. if you're not using one, it will make browsing immensely more enjoyable...

it would be great if youtube would just count the autoplays, but they have a policy against embedding files. again, it's this strange cultural weirdness at youtube, concerned people are inflating their hit counts by embedding them in autoplay scripts. i don't know how paranoid that is, but it's reasonable enough, on some level.

but, there's obviously a difference between autoplaying a track on your channel and embedding it on an ad server. when somebody clicks on your channel, they're obviously interested in your videos. it clearly meets the definition of a "view", and is being discarded on a technicality. it really *should* count.

regardless, i'm still getting more views on any particular track by putting it on the front page with a big button (and because i use flashblock, i didn't even realize it was autplaying when i started doing this, i just thought it was a big button - and a big button is exactly what it is for flashblock users) than i would otherwise, so i'm still coming out ahead with this. i've considered maybe putting a single video in the top spot instead, but i can't get such a big button or that nice article like format with the writing, so it will look really goofy. now that this is more clear in my head, though, i should look at it more closely, maybe i can mess with it...

but the ideal solution would be either:

a) youtube counts the autoplays on the front page of a channel (but not the other autoplays) or
b) youtube allows the user to turn off the autoplay on their trailer.

the workaround is to use flashblock...

yeah, a single video there doesn't look good at all. i'm going to have to just eat it and hope the chorus of people pushing for the reversal of autoplay is loud enough to have an effect.

but, i was thinking it's been undercounted by a few hundred hits, most fairly recently...

it's actually probably a few thousand, going back to may.

but, it's certainly annoying, even if i'm content with it. from a musician's standpoint, a featured track is a really great feature - whether it autoplays or not. i mean, i have to think a good 80%+ of people are going to click the button if they make it to the channel. it's a giant button. people like to click giant buttons! but, instead it just plays, denying people the opportunity to make the conscious choice to purposefully view the video with intent. i mean, if they're going to be so strict about it, it's kind of dumb to deny somebody the opportunity to click the button then claim they didn't really want to watch the video. in reality, the vast majority actually probably really did want to watch the video...

now, i'd expect to see a dramatic drop in people that are interested in clicking a second video, which is what i'm seeing, absolutely. but i'd expect almost everybody legitimately wants to click the first one.

the more i think about it, i'm almost upset about it solely because it denies people the opportunity to click the button. there's a special kind of joy in clicking the button, especially one of such girth.

so, install flashblock - you'll get the button.

the flip side of it is that the whole channel marketing thing isn't really catching on. i've posted several videos with well over 100 subscribers to see basically none of them watch it. i really have no idea why they subscribed at all, but the conclusion seems to be that very few people are reading their youtube feeds. and, really, it's hard to blame them. you can check your facebook feed on the bus. you've gotta be sitting down by yourself to check your youtube feed. it's kind of destined to be a niche thing without much real value in terms of reach. i'd hazard a guess that most of the people with lots of subscribers aren't really interacting with viewers that way, it's probably more people going to the site directly to check for new videos (and partly because they don't want to wade through their feed). personally, that's how i deal with vice news. i don't check my feed for updates on the ukraine thing, i go right to the channel and look for new videos.

so, like, as somebody that's running a channel, do i really want them to subscribe? it's not my priority, in terms of trying to get across to people. the priority is getting them to listen to something as soon as they get to the page, whether that means clicking a button or having it recorded as a view or not....

but, honestly, i couldn't see why somebody doing a video blog would want you to subscribe as their top priority, either. the top priority for anybody at all should always be directing people to content while they're there, right at that point, not bookmarking the site for later. you're going to be looking at an incredibly low return rate in just about any context. you want people to engage while they're there in the moment, not at some undetermined point in the future that chances are low will even happen at all.

for a company that focuses so much on advertising, they seem to be rather dense in terms of what they're forcing their users to focus on.

or, as i've pointed out repeatedly, lost in a corporate culture that has lost touch with reality. perhaps the company has this aloof, abstract idea of turning youtube into a subscriber-based site. but, a youtube channel is not a tv channel. a computer is not a television set. surfing habits are fundamentally, inherently different than viewing habits, because the options are unlimited and user-initiated. if you put a search box in a tv set, nobody would watch nbc or fox. so, it just doesn't reflect the reality of how anybody is going to actually interact with the content.

i guess it's a common problem in how people think, generally. people seem to want to project the reality they wish would exist, rather than analyze the reality that actually does exist and adjust themselves to it.