I was complaining the other day that YouTube was not counting the views by my patrons at all. I know for sure that all of my recent streams should have had at least 1-2 viewers watching basically all the time because the patrons were there. Nevertheless, three out of the last four streams had nothing regardless. One had literally nothing despite 59 chat messages even.
The Scientific Experiment
One of my patrons suggested that maybe it's because they were using ad blockers. It sounded plausible, so I decided to conduct a little scientific experiment to test the theory. I already had plenty of data on streams where they did use ad blockers, so I asked them to disable them when watching my next stream.
The result? Instead of zero views, zero concurrent viewers and no watch time at all, the stream had two concurrent viewers - the patrons - the whole time, as expected. It also got 11 views and a whopping 8 hours of watch time. That's a super stark contrast from the streams where they used ad blockers!
Now, it could of course be something else too. It's very little data, after all. However, so far it seems that the most likely reason why my patrons' views weren't counted was indeed because they were using ad blockers.
Want to Support Your Favorite Streamer?
Disable your ad blocker when watching their streams. YouTube live streams don't have ads anyway, so no harm doing it. It costs nothing, and even a single lengthy view can do wonders to a small streamer's visibility and sense of purpose.
If you want to go an extra mile to support your favorite, Adblock (not Plus) and uBlock Origin allow you to disable ads for specific YouTube channels too.
