So here's a curious phenomenon, if you're a Youtuber, lets see if this is happening to you as well. I had a big Youtuber get in touch with me today claiming that YouTube wasn't monetizing videos once they were older than 48 hours. I looked at my data and noticed that wasn't the case, videos were still earning revenue proportionate to their viewcount with a normal ratio of monetized playbacks.

HOWEVER, what I did notice is that over the past few weeks, video views have been dropping like a rock after the first 48 hours. Now of course, a video usually gains most of its views in the first 48 hours for active channels, that's not unusual, but the rate at which active viewcount is dropping after that period is. It's extreme, the graph looks like a sheer cliff face. Our videos usually have a nice longtail and graphs on older videos are much smoother on the view decrease but newer videos, with the exception of the podcasts (lots of people come back to those to watch them in more than one sitting) are seeing that viewcount plummet after 48 hours. The videos themselves are doing fine because in those first 48 hours they're earning plenty, but that gigantic drop off after 48 hours indicates to me that YouTube has changed something again. What exactly? Well I'd speculate and that's all I can do at this point, that it's either related to the sub-box or to related videos.

The easiest explanation is that people are simply not seeing and stumbling upon videos older than 48 hours anymore, they're having to specific go out of there way to find them, whereas prior to that they were seeing them more often in related videos, searches and so on and in their sub-boxes. Anyone else seeing similar indicators on their analytics? If true, it seems like YouTube might be putting a lot of priority on new videos now rather than peoples back catalogues.

That could be potentially harmful and it'd be important to know for those who makes less regular videos, since they'd be put at a disadvantage to those who make content daily.