The Biggest Change I Have Seen in 15 Years on YouTube
I've been on YouTube 15 years, and YouTube just made the biggest change I've ever seen, because they are changing the way views are counted on the platform. YouTube published a post announcing this, and I predict that everyone's views across the board are going to 10x at a minimum. This all comes down to wording and what they call a view. YouTube has needed to make this change because Instagram, TikTok, X, and these other platforms have managed to convince a lot of creators that they're more important with one simple metric: they basically count impressions as views. And YouTube is finally changing to keep up. They already changed this for shorts, and now they're changing it for long-form videos too. This is a huge deal.
Here's how it works. The old metric that YouTube used to call views is now going to be called engaged views. From now on, impressions — basically whenever a video is shown on YouTube — will be counted as a view. That means we should see a lot higher view counts, which is really good, because if you want YouTube to succeed as a platform, we ultimately need higher view counts.
468 Views or 3,900 Views: Which Would You Click?
Here is a good example. I just made a video talking about how I rebuilt Skool with Claude. That video has been shown 3,900 times on YouTube, but their existing engagement metrics would only call that 468 views, because those are engaged views — views where people watched an average of three minutes. But let's break it down and realize how simple most people are, especially creators, but even regular people. Are you more likely to watch a video that has 468 views or 3,900 views? The social proof on one is dramatically different from the other.
My YouTube coach channel has been one of the best examples of why this change is really valuable. That channel looks to a lot of people like nobody's watching my videos — like the channel is just irrelevant, like I don't know anything about YouTube, I'm just posting and nobody cares. But if you look at the reach on those videos, almost every video I'm doing on that channel is getting at least 1,000 impressions. So if you see a video with 83 views, you think, that's useless. But if that same video says 1,000-plus views on it, you automatically assume it's a better video. It also communicates the reality: that video is seen by a lot of people. It's seen by thousands of people, even though only 83 people chose to actually spend time watching it — and those 83 people spent an average of five minutes watching it.
Why This Is Massive for Small Channels
This change is massive both for creators and the audience, and it's going to make it way easier for small channels to get off the ground. In my experience, if you have less than 1,000 views on a video, it's often really difficult to get anybody to watch it — hence my YouTube coach channel having a challenging time taking off, because it can't get anybody to watch it. For most new YouTube channels, just getting a video to 1,000 views is like the baseline of social proof. And that reach is already happening in the back end. I did a video called The Easiest Way to Grow a YouTube Channel. You look at it: 141 views. Most people think, this guy doesn't know anything, nobody's watching his video. But if it said 2,000 views on it, you'd think, okay, maybe this is cool — brand new video, 2,000 views, I'll watch it.
Right now, most viewers are going to have no idea that YouTube made this change, because they're not paying attention. But for most creators, this is huge. I've had a hard time talking to people who do Instagram. They look at my channels and think that I don't have any audience, that nobody cares about my videos, because they're used to seeing much bigger numbers. But when I ask them, well, how long are people watching your videos? Then they have really small answers — like 30 seconds each.
My ICP Channel: 349,000 Views, 3 Million Impressions, $1,700 Earned
Let me give you an example. My Jerry Banfield ICP channel — I just made it March 21st, 2026 — has 349,000 views. Now, I tell some people on Instagram about that and they think it's nothing, because they're sitting there getting 339,000 quote-unquote views much more easily. But a different metric on this channel shows the depth it actually has. If I go to the lifetime stats in the analytics on this channel, first off, I made $1,700 on this channel — and people show me their Instagram accounts with millions of views, and they've made $0. I've made $1,700. That's a lot. And that's just off the ad revenue. I've made more than that from people going to my website. Somebody just paid $96 for the live chat.
But check out these different metrics: 3 million impressions on my videos. If my channel said 3 million views on it, that looks a lot different to people than 300,000. My shorts: 22,000 views. My live streams: 300,000 impressions. This is a big deal because YouTube is going to start putting all these bigger numbers across all the different formats now. That will make videos easier for people to click and watch, and it will give creators more positive reinforcement.
MrBeast Is About to Have Billion-View Videos
Then you have people like MrBeast. If you're on Instagram and TikTok, it's not obvious exactly how big MrBeast truly is. Because if you look at his channel, yeah, he's got 500 million subscribers. But if you just look at his videos, people who have been on TikTok and Instagram will literally not be impressed with this guy getting 80-some million views on his videos, because lots of TikTok and Instagram creators have that kind of number. But when YouTube switches the view count, MrBeast will be in a position where some of his videos will start saying a billion views. With the new way of counting, some of his videos are billion-view videos right now, because the number of times those videos have actually been shown on YouTube easily reaches a billion impressions on some of them. Even one of his videos that I watched and enjoyed might be a billion-view video already. And here's why: the click-through rate, especially as videos get more popular, often drops. Some of MrBeast's videos might have a six or seven percent click-through rate. So a video like that would already be a billion-view video. I don't know if they're going to retroactively change the old metrics, but one of those videos is probably actually closer to two billion.
From there, people will be able to see very easily and very plainly how YouTube is the number one content platform for video, at least as far as I can see. But they've been strangling their potential by calling everything impressions. And to me, impressions is honestly a more honest metric than calling it views — but views is what's real to people.
What This Means for My Vlogs Channel — and Yours
So I'm really excited for this update. I think it's really well timed to help me build a bigger audience. Take my vlogs channel. My vlogs channel has been getting an awesome amount of attention, and yet if you look at the metrics, it doesn't look like that much compared to Instagram or TikTok. I've been wondering, should I do Instagram and TikTok, or am I getting enough on YouTube? In the last 28 days, my Jerry Banfield channel has gotten 374,000 impressions. Go through the videos one by one. My video "I finally understood what went wrong with the queen" — the way people are used to TikTok and Facebook, they'd figure, oh, 1,000 views, so what, not a big deal. But that video got 32,000 impressions. If somebody sees a video with 32,000 views, they're going to think, oh, that's significant. My video about having four dates canceled in a row: 37,000 impressions. The click-through rate gets washed out a lot better too — another one at 17,000. Basically, every single video on this channel is going to have tens of thousands of views when this change comes into play. And the difference between a channel where every video has a few hundred views versus every video having tens of thousands of views — the social proof makes a massive difference. Right now, when people look at it, they figure, how are you even making money on this? Hardly anybody's watching you. But once you have tens of thousands of views on every video, people just intuitively understand. They're like, oh, okay.
I've hit this point over and over again because this is a gigantic change — bigger than any change I've seen, and I've seen a lot of changes in 15 years on YouTube. Creators and audiences judge videos so much by view count that higher view counts equal better results for almost everybody, especially if you're grinding out videos. Viewers at first may not even understand this change — they may just wonder why the view counts went up. On average, people may start expecting videos to have more views on them, but that will probably take a while. And I think this is a beautiful time for smaller content creators, because finally you are going to be able to get more people to watch your videos and get over that threshold of being a small YouTuber much more easily.
Chat With Me, Get Coaching, and Let Me Read Every One of Your Comments
If you'd like to chat with me, talk, and have me read every one of your comments, join the Jerry Banfield Family — I recently launched this. I have a lifetime chat that you can join, you can set up a profile directly on my website, and you can see in the conversations the people who've already joined. You can talk to me there — I'm in there every single day.
You can also work with me directly. I've got books I'm putting up, a Skool community if you use Skool, and I'm going to make a dedicated YouTube coaching program for those of you who want to really take YouTube seriously and learn from a master. I'm fantastic as a coach, and some of you will be able to get even better results than me. I always remember thinking, why does Tiger Woods have a golf coach? This is the best guy in the game. Well, the coach helps him stay on top of his own game. And that's what I'm going to do. I've already coached a lot of people on YouTube — you can see how I teach in my YouTube Coaching playlist — and I'm going to put the coaching program up directly on my website.
You can also schedule a one-on-one Zoom call with me whenever you want to go deeper.
I'll be here for you whenever you need me. You can start off just joining the chat or scheduling a call — and I hope to see you soon.