Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Declining Views - Top Five Countries

The United States, India, Phillipines, UK, and Canada account for 60.9% of all views this year on my YouTube Channel. As I posted yesterday, there is a sharp decline visible in the number of views over the past two weeks - and I was quite surprised by this. Could it be related to the Covid 19 crisis? 

I decided to dig a little deeper into the decline in views by Geography, and was surprised to find that the decline started earlier than I had thought. In the chart below from YouTube Analytics, you can see the peak views for the blue line (USA, 24.4% of views) was in mid February:

Click/tap image to enlarge.

From mid February there is a gradual decline by week - almost halving the number of views for the US. The green line (India, 18.5% of views) doesn't start to decline until mid March - but is dropping now too.

I have no insight into why this is happening - there are many possiblilites. Obviously, people could simply be choosing not to view my videos anymore, YouTube may have made modifications to the algorithms that recommend videos, I still have a warning on my channel for violation of terms, and some of my videos are getting quite old now. One thing that I feel may be a reason is that all over the world Colleges are dropping exams and replacing them with assignments/projects. Suddenly the requirement to perform something like a t-Test and many other calculations during a two hour period in an exam hall no longer exists. I know from comments in the channel that many students use my videos to prepare for exams - this pressure is now gone.

Whatever the reason, I hope that the channel can bounce back. It is ironic that the number of views for my existing on-line material is declining when at the same time I am switching all my classes to the on-line environment.

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