The Current

YouTube announced on 17 August that from today, 24 August, a view gets counted the moment a video starts playing. Until now a long-form video or a livestream needed roughly thirty seconds of watch time before it counted as a view, while Shorts have been counted from the first frame since March last year, so this puts all three formats on the same rule and brings YouTube in line with how TikTok and Instagram have always done it.

The immediate effect is that public view counts across YouTube are going to rise, and none of that is because anyone's content got better. If you compare this month to last month on YouTube, or you send numbers to anyone, that comparison is broken as of today, and it's worth writing that down somewhere before you forget you knew it.

Your view counts are about to jump, and none of it means your content got better.

The number that actually told you something hasn't disappeared, it just got renamed. The old measure is now called an engaged view, it lives in YouTube Studio's analytics under advanced mode, and that's the one to look at if you want to know whether people watched rather than just landed. YouTube has also confirmed this doesn't change payouts or Partner Program eligibility, because both of those still run on engaged views and engaged watch hours, so nobody's earnings move because of it.

So the practical version: go and find engaged views in your analytics this week and treat that as your real number from here on. Public view counts were always the softest thing on the platform, and as of today they got softer.

If you run Google Search ads, this one has a date on it and the date is next Tuesday. Google emailed affected advertisers in early August and published the technical detail on its developer blog on 12 August: from 1 September, any Search campaign still using automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting gets upgraded to AI Max automatically, whether you asked for it or not.

AI Max is Google's bundle of AI matching and creative features, and the honest short version of what it does is give Google more room to move, both in deciding which searches your ads appear against and in rewriting your headlines and descriptions. Campaigns pulled in because of automatically created assets get search term matching and text customisation switched on by default. Campaigns pulled in because of the broad match setting get search term matching.

There's no advance opt-out button, which is the part I find genuinely annoying.

Google hasn't published a way to decline it in advance, which is the part I find genuinely annoying, so the choice you actually have is a slightly awkward one. You can turn off automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting in the affected campaigns before 1 September, which takes you out of the automatic upgrade, or you can let it happen and then switch AI Max off at campaign level afterwards. Google also stopped anyone creating new campaign-level broad match or legacy automatically created assets back on 3 August, so this is clearly the direction of travel rather than a trial.

What I won't tell you is whether it's good or bad for you, because there's no independent data yet on what AI Max does to a small budget, and Google's case for it is Google's case. What I would do is open the account this week, note which campaigns are affected, write down what your cost per lead looks like right now, and then actually go back and check it in the middle of September. If the numbers get worse you'll badly want that before picture, and if they get better you'll want to know that too.

On 19 August Meta added a set of business features to Meta AI aimed squarely at people running their own marketing. If you've got a professional Facebook or Instagram account you can connect it, along with your Meta ad campaigns and your Google Workspace, meaning Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Slides, and then just ask questions in plain language: how last month's posts did, which ads are still working and which have gone stale, where the budget isn't pulling its weight. It'll build a document or a spreadsheet out of what it finds, and you can set recurring tasks so a report turns up without you having to ask for it again every time. It's live across meta.ai, the Meta AI app, and a new desktop app that landed on the Mac the same day. Meta says it's free to get started and that businesses wanting heavier use will eventually need a Meta One subscription, which tells you roughly where this is heading.

Two honest caveats. The first is that Meta is marking its own homework here, so an assistant built by the company selling you the ads is going to be structurally optimistic about the ads, and "spend a bit more" is the easiest recommendation in the world for it to arrive at. The second is that connecting your Gmail and your Docs to Meta is a real decision rather than a small one, so if you do try it, I'd connect the social and ad accounts first and leave Workspace out of it until you've seen whether the thing is actually useful to you.

With all that said, this is the first version of this idea I'd suggest a small business owner spend twenty minutes on, because the honest alternative most people are using is staring at Meta's own dashboard and guessing.

Reddit reported its June quarter on 30 July, and the numbers are worth a look even if you've never thought of it as a marketing platform. Revenue was $805 million for the quarter, up 61% on the same quarter a year earlier, with advertising specifically at $762 million and up 64%. The line in there that matters most for you is that Reddit's mid-market and small-business channel revenue more than doubled, and that isn't big brands, that's businesses closer to your size deciding to give it a go.

Reddit's June-quarter growth against the same quarter a year earlier: advertising revenue, total revenue, weekly active uniques and daily active uniques. Source: Reddit Q2 2026 results, reported 30 July 2026.

The reason I think this matters isn't really the ad platform though, it's why people are there in the first place. Reddit is one of the few places left where somebody can ask who's actually any good at something in their city and get answers from people with no stake in the outcome, and as more of the open web fills up with writing built to rank rather than to help, that kind of answer gets more valuable rather than less.

People go there to ask who's actually any good, and get an answer from someone with no stake in it.

Reddit's own results hint at the other side of that, because its share price dropped about 11% after it told investors search referrals had been choppy, which is a fair reminder that a lot of its traffic still arrives by way of Google and that isn't entirely in Reddit's hands.

The practical version is smaller than the numbers make it sound. Go and find the subreddit your customers are actually in, read it for a fortnight without posting anything, and then be genuinely useful in it as yourself, because Reddit is unusually good at spotting and removing someone who's turned up purely to advertise. If you get to the point where people mention you without being asked, that's worth considerably more than any campaign you could run there.