Technology

Broadly maybe the viewers are just getting sick of all of the shilling for cheap shit that goes on with the ever increasing sponsor segments so many channels have these days. Arguments will be had about just how needed all of those marketing dollars are for the creator to keep doing their thing vs them getting used to a lot of money and wanting even more of it. But the end result is a worse viewing experience for the consumer. I know there are a lot of channels that make good content that I've stopped watching because they spend a quarter of the video shilling junk. Sure sponserblock would get rid of those sections, but it won't send a message like unsubscribing and stopping watching them completely will.

Also maybe this is a larger Youtube usage hit due to their aggressive anti-adblock nonsense and uptick in ads and shitty UI design.

For Linus specifically, he has the above issues as well as having been very publicly outed as a slimy deuce. What his channels put out is not unique enough these days to justify dealing with the shilling and his companies bad behavior.

Some other analysis: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/youtube-views-are-down-dont-panic

Because of short videos?

This might be another example of over reliance on AI to judge what’s good or not to show users: https://news.clownfishtv.com/p/reddit-asks-did-youtube-break-itself

Maybe if he did videos that were interesting again...not like my wife hates our tech at home videos or whatever

I can't talk about the others but LTT went form a tech channel to a luxury products channel. I'd blame some of their loss on that and the controversies.

I think the biggest channels I watch have under 4 million subscribers, and most of my channels have less than a million. I've never watched the big channels, so I don't really care.

A while back, YT asked me about turning on my watch history, but I didn't know it was off. I don't know what that was about--I think they changed something--but my knee-jerk reaction is to NOT do what they want me to do, so I left it off. Now I just watch whatever is new from my subscriptions, and don't have any suggestions cluttering my front page, which is a much better way to use YT, imo. So, thanks, YT.