YouTube is a mysterious monopoly

September 8, 2025

Yesterday I saw this Bluesky post from Adrian Black. He runs Adrian’s Digital Basement, a retro computer repair channel I really enjoy. In the post, he points out a trend I didn’t know about: YouTube views seem to have fallen off a cliff recently.

Further down the thread, Jeff Geerling linked to a blog post on the subject. Geerling is another technology YouTuber whose work I enjoy. He’s also seen a large drop in views. In that post, Geerling shares some data: while views are down, likes and revenue have been mostly steady. He guesses that this might be caused by a change in how views are calculated, but it’s just a guess. YouTube hasn’t mentioned anything about a change, and the drop in views has been going on for about a month.

Geerling also notes that many people on YouTube are paid by sponsors, and those sponsors use recent video views as a key metric. If this change has happened suddenly and there’s no official word from YouTube, how are YouTube creators supposed to convince sponsors to re-adjust expectations?

Today I saw a video by the RedLetterMedia folks on this topic. If you’re not familiar with their work, be warned that the video is vulgar and juvenile (sorry, I love their stuff). They’re blaming the change on Restricted Mode, which is definitely not a new feature but seems to have randomly turned on for some people recently. Does this have anything to do with anything? Who knows!

I pay for YouTube Premium. For my money, it’s the best bang-for-the-buck subscription service on the market. I also think that YouTube is a monopoly. There are some alternatives — I also pay for Nebula, for example — but they’re tiny in comparison. YouTube is effectively the place to watch video on the internet.

It’s also a place where a lot of people are trying to make a living. YouTube has approximately zero competition where anyone can upload their own videos and monetize them. Now those creators are seeing a key metric decline drastically, and in a way that might affect their bottom line. I tried looking, and couldn’t find any official word about this change. Heck, it might be a bug or some unknown effect that’s only hitting a small portion of the service! Creators are forced to share notes and read tea leaves as weird things happen to their traffic. I can only guess how demoralizing that must feel.

I don’t know what the answer is here. I wish there was a real alternative, but I can’t see that happening soon. I’ll continue to support smaller services like Nebula, but I think most people won’t pay for a service when YouTube is free with ads. I also think it would take some doing to get advertisers to jump on a new platform when YouTube has almost all the viewers.

I think this is a space in real need of competition. ¹ Just because it’s good now doesn’t mean it will always be. However, there are only a handful of companies who could make a go of it… and I think they’d lose a lot of money for a long time while they tried. That really sucks.

I originally had here “I think this space is ripe for disruption”, but that was a poor choice of words as pointed out on this Hacker News thread. ↩