Audience attention metrics are deceiving.

For example, not all “views” are created equal. The average view on YouTube is much longer than the average view on TikTok, but they are both called “views”.

This is advantageous to TikTok (and shorter form platforms in general) because shorter content makes for larger numbers of views. People like large numbers.

In reality, a YouTube video with 10K views could attract twice as much attention (in terms of time) as a TikTok with 1M views if the average watch time on the YouTube video is 10 minutes and the average watch time on the TikTok is 3 seconds.

That’s 100K minutes on YouTube vs. 50K minutes on TikTok even though the headline “views” count on TikTok is 100x that of YouTube.

That’s what I mean by deceiving. The time variable is invisible.

But we know it’s all about time & attention in the end. What matters is how many people paid attention and for how long. “Views” don’t tell you either. Twitter “impressions” are another story.

Perhaps these platforms could standardize on alternative main metrics like “minutes” and “uniques”. YouTube should be open to something like this. TikTok would probably resist. But then we could actually compare attention across platforms.

Until then, it’s just deceiving.