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- "Should a publisher’s commercial decisions be honored by the technology they pay for?" Flightpath is shipping a tool today called Automation Playbooks, a new tool to combat what it calls unreliable ad delivery from podcast ad-tech partners. The tool logs in regularly to check all campaigns against delivery, and to make changes to live orders. The release quotes one frustrated Head of Revenue at a podcast network: "Being asked to re-flight thousands of orders by hand is not a viable solution to a problem we did not create."
- Flightpath has also published an open letter from its co-founders. Titled "We are not going to sit this one out", the piece highlights recent changes by one "major technology platform", which has "turned a major upgrade of their systems into a five alarm fire for their publishers." Some, the company says, are at risk of losing as much as 50% of revenue on currently running orders, and the post promises that Flightpath will speak up and lend full support to affected publishers.
- You can contact Flightpath directly; but to maintain confidentiality, you can also share your story and experiences through us: editor@podnews.net. We would suggest that the industry isn't well served by sitting on our hands and trying not to rock the boat. If we're being given a rough sea, then it's all hands on deck.
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YouTube has added more explanation about the change to "views" and "engaged views". An "auto-play" on the homepage (when you hover over a video) will now be counted as a view if it starts playing - and an "engaged view" if it keeps playing "for some amount of seconds". (For us to note - there's no audio playing when this happens. It it works with your eyes closed...)
- Additionally, YouTube's Rene Ritchie adds: "I've heard some people say it previously took 30 seconds for a view to be counted. And that's simply not the case. YouTube doesn't specify exactly how many seconds, because it can vary across surfaces. YouTube also doesn't want anyone focusing on gaming the metric: just making the most satisfying experience possible for viewers." YouTube were a participant in the AMP Accords, which "with no dissenting votes" defined a play as "30 seconds of content played". So... wtf?
- "The previous definition of a view will now be called an 'engaged view'", says YouTube in its announcement. But even for long-form videos, these numbers are actually not the same. You can compare both the existing "views" and "engaged views" numbers in YouTube Studio - and when we did that for our tiny YouTube channel, the numbers were different. Michael Paretsky from Podstock analyzed 300,000 YouTube podcast episodes to discover that "engaged views" is 7% lower than the existing "view" count; and for some shows, there was much more of a significant difference. "For some shows, this change will be a rounding error. For others, it could be a major commercial event," he said.
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