Exactly how valuable is 100 million views?
I have a general theory that people care more about top 10 lists in 2024 than they did in 2004 because no one has any idea what’s really popular anymore beyond the NFL and Taylor Swift. More than 43% of Gen Z audiences participate in a fandom that no one in their personal life has heard of, according to YouTube Insights. The report adds that about 53% of Gen Z create content for the niche fandoms they participate in. Teenagers are spending more time within worlds that people in their lives don’t know exist and they’re spending more time creating for those smaller worlds.
That’s great — but it also highlights the increased fragmentation that occurs when people chase tinier internets. They still want to know what everyone is watching, listening to, playing, reading, and eating even if they’re not doing the same thing. Popularity lists as measured by total views or purchases have always helped tell that story. Box office reports, Top 40 countdowns, and rankings existed as giant neon signs to point people toward mass cultural participation. It was just easier to navigate when there were a handful of movies at the cineplex, a handful of major artists each month, and a handful of truly popular shows.
I was thinking about the importance of these rankings and measurement systems after seeing a Rolling Stone report that suggested Donald Trump was worried about Kamala Harris’ TV ratings at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago last week. He had good reason: the DNC beat out the RNC each of the major nights by a double figure percentage, with Harris’ speech drawing an audience 22% larger than Trump’s according to Nielsen’s next-day figures.
The ego of a former president aside, Trump’s concern tickled me for a few reasons. Core amongst them is that he has spent the last many months pivoting away from traditional television to focus on YouTube podcasters (Theo Von, Logan Paul), Twitch streamers (Adin Ross), and billionaires (Elon Musk on X). The president who won his candidacy on Twitter seemed to embrace that world even more this time around, but he couldn’t stop thinking about his first obsession: TV. More to the point, Trump was worried about what those specific set of numbers would say about his popularity compared to Harris’.
Trump understands the importance of meeting his base where they are, but his concern highlights the staying power of third-party validation when it comes to measuring the media we consume. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure he will boast about his YouTube and X numbers, but his concern over TV ratings restates an unchanged truth: social video metrics are mostly meaningless because there’s no systemic benchmark to signify and validate success the way there currently is in music and TV. Simply put: what the fuck does a 100 million views on X even mean?
YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X all define a “view” differently.
The attention economy, a term that you and I have heard again and again, solely exists as a theory that time spent looking at something is increasingly worth more as the places we spend time digitize. Worth is defined by the quantity of collective attention a piece of media generates, which is then standardized and sold to advertisers. Standardization has changed with social video. Consider TV. Measurement firms like Nielsen became billion-dollar businesses because they helped standardize measurement benchmarks for advertisers and media operators. The Big Bang Theory’s 10 million audience size was, therefore, comparable to the NFL’s 14 million audience size, which was comparable to The Daily Show’s two million audience size. Nielsen isn’t perfect, and other data measurement startups have tried to create stronger benchmarks in a digital-first environment, but the point is that an entire industry and groups of audiences recognized the validity of perceived impact.
YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X all define a “view” differently. A view on YouTube consists of at least 30 seconds watched. Three seconds is considered a view on Instagram compared to one second for TikTok. X is my favorite: a view is two seconds of a video watched when the video takes up half the screen. Let me paint that picture for you even more. If you’re scrolling through X and there’s a video playing above a tweet you take a second to read — even if you’re not playing the video above and so long as it takes up half the screen — it’s a view. Even digital creators who spend their time hyperfixating on these metrics think it’s hilarious. Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson posted a re-cut version of his “$1 vs $1,000,000 car” YouTube video and posted it on X to see how it would perform. It was then run as an ad — not by Donaldson’s team — to inflate views as an example of how powerful X can be for video. Donaldson posted what he earned from the video, noting it had generated more than $260,000 based on views. If you’re an advertiser, does the fact that Donaldson received 20 million views on a video that most people scrolled past constitute the same value as a video being sought out on YouTube or actually being engaged with on TikTok?
How do you create a 1:1 benchmark in this world? What is actually popular?
All social platforms use different machine learning algorithmic tools that impact the types of content that travel. Primetime slots in broadcast are replaced with prioritized feed placement for an additional fee. These primetime slots that also existed within one unified ecosystem with limited access points are also replaced with platforms being consumed on different devices at different times and surfaced based on perceived individual user interest. This makes it nearly impossible to benchmark views across multiple platforms; that’s a problem when the internet is defined by its decentralized media approach. It’s also what makes it difficult for someone like Trump to boast about his appearance on Theo Von or Logan Paul’s podcast on YouTube, which is made explicitly clear when Variety and Bloomberg are writing ratings stories about the RNC and DNC instead of his interview with Elon.
Does any of this really matter is a question hanging over our entire world these days. It may not seem like it on the surface. This blog post started as one man’s ego tied to a number whose value is debated time and time again. Below the surface, however, is a trillion dollar economy that starts to feel like a house of cards the more that you dig. Digital ads are sold at a value that corresponds to traffic, engagement, and attention. This is a trillion dollar industry. But advertising watchdogs have discovered that more than 25% of all click through on digital ads is fake, with 64% of all fake traffic coming from click farms. The entire thing is a house of cards as Tim Hwang writes about in his phenomenal book Subprime Attention Crisis. As Hwang says, “The measurability of the online ad economy is an inch wide and a mile deep. As such, the tidal wave of data that has accompanied the development of online advertising provides only an illusion of greater transparency.
“This matters because opacity permits market bubbles to form. In the mortgage crisis, the complexity of the market in exotic financial instruments made it challenging to see that the underlying mortgages were extremely likely to default. If buyers had known that AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities contained so much bad debt, it would have been challenging to get anyone to buy the assets.”
This is where we are with advertising on the internet. It’s getting worse each year. Ad fraud grew from $35 billion to $100 billion between 2018 and 2023, according to Statista. With Google and Meta controlling nearly 50% of all major ad-selling companies (by revenue) in the United States, there are also fewer options for advertisers to seek out. We’re seeing some of this spend move to connected TVs (CTV) and companies like Amazon. Advertisers want to meet people where they are, but they also want stronger validation for their purchases, seeking out ecosystems with easier-to-understand benchmarks. This makes the everyday risks associated with ad spending a little more digestible. It at least doesn’t require downing a bottle of Pepto Bismol first.
A big part of why we still talk about how many subscribers a creator has or how many streams a movie gets is because we’re still seeking out that connectivity
When we talk about the true impact of the attention economy, this is it. The same reason that Trump is concerned about TV ratings is the same reason that academics, executives, journalists, and politicians are talking about continued ad-fraud: one has a distinct, objective benchmark for validated success — of impact on people — and the other is still a guessing game about whether those people are even real. Obviously digital advertising works because if it didn’t Alphabet wouldn’t have made more than $200 billion in Google Search and YouTube advertising in 2023 alone — an increase of 7.7% compared to the year before. But when there are so many platforms competing for so much attention, with each of those platforms operating by different views metrics and no benchmark for what those views actually represent, we get into a world of whack-a-mole. A very, very costly game of whack-a-mole.
I started by talking about how popularity lists, ratings, and rankings help people feel connected. A big part of why we still talk about how many subscribers a creator has or how many streams a movie gets is because we’re still seeking out that connectivity: something we participated in, or something we want to participate in, is being participated in by others. The time we give to something is the most valuable currency we have. It’s also the most valuable metric for those behind the scenes working to figure out where to place their bets and keep the machine cogs turning. Creating a benchmark for this kind of attention — for these kinds of views — is more important than ever, but the more decentralized we get the more difficult that becomes.
Critics may write off these concerns as a byproduct of the next cultural and technological wave. They will point to separate ecosystems existing and hyper targeted advertising working within those smaller ecosystems. I agree — but I’d also point out that people flock to Instagram and TikTok because that’s where content is. They flock to Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft because that’s where the people are. They watch Netflix and Disney+ because that’s what people are talking about. We still want to participate in cultural zeitgeists. We have more opportunities than ever to discover shows and artists that feel made for us, but that doesn’t replace wanting to be part of the larger group.
If it gets to the point where we can’t process what’s truly popular anymore, if we can’t attach a benchmarked value for advertisers and buyers, what happens to the economy that has sustained all of this development so far? It’s a question I don’t know the answer to. But I think the fact that Trump is anxiously watching Nielsen ratings even after months of YouTube tour stops, the fact that we want Top 10s on Netflix even when we’re watching our own show that no one in our persona life has heard of, the fact that we want better trending lists on Spotify instead of just relying on our own recommendations reminds us that we don’t want to live on our own personal remote islands. The further apart we drift, the more we demand opportunities to come together again.
