YouTube “views” nearly doubled but the audience stayed the same. So how do ad buyers establish a price when the numbers are suddenly so different? We built a free tool to help solve the problem.
But first, a little background
YouTube recently changed the definition of a “view.” Up until late August of 2026, users had to watch a certain amount (the exact number of seconds is hard to pin down) of a YouTube video for an interaction to count as a “view.” Now, watching even a single frame of a video will make the YouTube view count go up.
The result: most podcasters and creators see more views on their videos. In fact, based on our analysis of hundreds of thousands of YouTube episodes, “views” for the average podcast have nearly doubled. But this doesn't mean that twice as many people are watching YouTube videos.
It’s the same number of people, just generating bigger numbers.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is organizations that buy ads on YouTube were left to come up with a price under this new inflated system. Advertisers pay money for an ad placement with the expectation that that video is going to see a certain amount of views, but if those views are now doubling, do advertisers now have to pay double? Did the prices for ads and YouTube videos just go up by 100% even though the audience size stayed the same?
The podcast industry came to a consensus on how to deal with this pretty quickly. In September 2026 at the Sounds Profitable Business Summit, a number of podcast ad buying agencies agreed to buy based on “engaged views.”
So, what is an engaged view?
According to YouTube, “an engaged view is defined as clicking to watch or watching past the initial seconds.” We understand this as spending a bit of time. Contrast this to a “view,” which is defined “as counting from the very first frame”. Essentially, ad buyers are deciding to stay the course and use the best number available, which is now called an “engaged view,” previously known as a “view.”
Inaccessible to advertisers
The issue with this is that the “engaged views” count is only available to the owner of the YouTube channel and is not publicly available (unlike “views”). It’s found in YouTube Studio, which is the dashboard that podcast creators access.
So, up until late August, advertisers were able to find the numbers that they were looking for quite easily on YouTube. Now the numbers that they care about are hidden and only available to the creator of the video.
So, what can we do?
Sharing screenshots and Google Sheets is simply not scalable. This is one of these problems that make it hard for anyone to invest in podcasting. We want to make things easier for advertisers, not harder. We want the best possible data that builds trust with advertisers.
So we decided to…
…launch a tool. Bumper's "Share Your Engaged Views" is an easy and free way for any podcaster, publisher, or network to share the engaged views number with advertisers or, frankly, anyone.
How does it work? The owner of a podcast and its YouTube channel gives Bumper access to the YouTube Analytics API. It’s only a few clicks. They then decide who should be able to see the engaged views, and Bumper shares those either through a website or an API. It's the simplest way to share your engaged views with a third party.
It's available now for free to anyone.