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YouTube is experimenting with real-time view and like counters

Adding new features that viewers would love to experience is essential to keeping YouTube as the most popular video streaming platform in the world. Considering this, the Google-run site conducts user-driven experiments to test out new features. These were recently made available to all users, while premium subscribers continue to receive first choice in certain tests. Then there are certain things that YouTube doesn’t promote, so viewers must find them on their own, mostly by accident. One such update that we’re currently seeing on videos is the updated view and like counter.

As of right now, the Android YouTube app shows likes and counts, but they stay the same as you watch the video. But this innovation uses clever animation to update the video’s likes and views in real time. The count and dynamic view animation are shown whether the movie is stopped or not. Moreover, it appears that the animation that comes before the numerical shift is still active when you reload YouTube after switching to another app.

Although there is a Reddit post from October that seems to address this little but helpful feature, and one user has provided a workaround to halt this behavior, we were unable to locate any YouTube blogs or other documentation relating to it.

Without any information from the YouTube team, it’s difficult to determine when this functionality became available on the app. Furthermore, it appears that only a small portion of YouTube viewers worldwide are included in this experiment. The video that is attached above was found by AP’s Manuel Vonau, a Google editor, even though I was unable to locate it on the Android version of YouTube. The test features and experiments thread on YouTube provides a thorough explanation of this issue.

The team announced the restricted release of AI-generated soundtracks for YouTube Shorts material more than two weeks ago, which is the most recent entry we could find on the YouTube experimental page. Some of the other in-development features that are being tested on the platform have been observed by us with great attention, and some are less popular than others.

The larger distribution of a smaller button to skip advertisements, which had been renamed to Skip, was recently noticed by a few members of the Android Police team. Although in small doses, August provided us with our first taste of this shift. Compared to the trial in which participants had to watch up to eleven non-skippable advertisements in a row, this isn’t as brutal, although the business finally abandoned these plans due to the reaction.