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YouTube will begin sharing a new metric in its Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, Violative View Rate, in an effort to provide transparency on what percentage of views on the Google-owned video site comes from content that violates its policies.
The report will now have a separate Views section, where people can see historical and fourth-quarter-2020 VVR data and details on its methodology. This data will be updated quarterly going forward.
YouTube said it began tracking VVR in 2017, and it represents the primary metric used internally to measure responsibility work.
Its most recent VVR rate, for the fourth quarter of 2020, was 0.16% to 0.18%, meaning that for every 10,000 views on its platform, 16 to 18 came from violative content. YouTube said this rate was down by more than 70% from the fourth quarter of 2017, largely due to its investments in machine learning.
YouTube calculates VVR by taking a sample of videos and sending it to its content reviewers, who inform the company which videos violate its policies. The company said VVR may fluctuate up and down, adding as an example that when a policy is updated, the rate will temporarily rise as efforts to detect that type of content are ramped up.
However, one glaring omission from VVR is total views of YouTube’s library, leaving interested parties to estimate based on older figures such as 2 billion users and over 500 hours of video uploaded per minute, which the company revealed in May 2019 and has not updated since.
YouTube director of trust and safety Jennifer O’Connor wrote in a blog post Tuesday, “VVR data gives critical context around how we’re protecting our community. Other metrics, like the turnaround time to remove a violative video, are important. But they don’t fully capture the actual impact of violative content on the viewer. For example, compare a violative video that got 100 views but stayed on our platform for more than 24 hours with content that reached thousands of views in the first few hours before removal. Which ultimately has more impact? We believe VVR is the best way for us to understand how harmful content impacts viewers and to identify where we need to make improvements.”
