Has anyone seen this?

[LearningStuff]

My channel is still tiny but I've been getting decent view time on my videos.

All of a sudden one of my videos started getting hundreds of views and the view time on that particular video has dropped to about 10 seconds on average. Previously it was getting a few views a day at 7+ minutes view time average, it's a 30 minute video.

The barrage has tanked the view time across my whole channel. My vids are 15-30 minutes long on average and I went from around 33% to 15% view time across my whole channel, not that it really matters of course but it's kind of bizarre.

 

[KatyAdelson]

The video might have been shared on Reddit, or a similar site. I noticed that I'll sometimes get really low watchtime from some info-sharing sites like reddit.

 

[LearningStuff]

Thanks Katy! I figure it was probably the video being posted somewhere, the extremely short watch time is odd though, the video is down to 3 seconds watch time on average now. I'm guessing mixed with the actual views whatever is causing the video watch time to come way down is literally viewing it for a split second, maybe a bot or something. Why would hundreds of humans play the video and immediately stop it? Seems kind of strange.

 

[Rhody Seth]

Sounds like bots to me. I've got a blog that I don't update much anymore. Back in the day I was a fairly heavy blogger - mostly running logs and race reports. Anyway I also did a few posts about cooking food for endurance events. One of my posts on "Banana Honey Rice Balls" has far outpaced every other post on my blog - this particular post has gotten 5.4k views whereas the next closest is 1.6k views. There's nothing particular inspiring about the rice balls post but for whatever reason it gets accessed by a lot of bots and algorithms. Strange stuff.

 

[LearningStuff]

Whatever was decimating the view time on that video is gone and the average watch time has climbed back up to around 10 minutes for the last 50 or so views.

Very bizarre.

 

[mirrorlessNY(youtuber)]

video is down to 3 seconds watch time on average now

wow that avg watch time was for a certain period? like past 7days?