YouTube announces new metric in Community Guidelines Enforcement Report

Violative View Rate, the new metric will provide an understanding of views generated from content that violates Community Guidelines on YouTube, and will be available for the Enforcement Report of Q4 2020 (Oct-Dec) and going forward.

Community Guidelines Enforcement Report will now have a separate section called ‘Views’ that will display historical and new (as updated) data providing an estimated percentage of the views on YouTube garnered from violative content to improve transparency the effectiveness of YouTube systems.

YouTube mentions Violative View Rate (VVR) is an effective way to gauge the impact of harmful content on viewers. VVR is calculated by assessing a sample of videos through content reviewers, who outline which content violates YouTube policies. The metric is intended to give an extensive overview of violative content that the systems may not have caught. The platform mentions the numbers would fluctuate up and down, depending on the content caught and classified as violative.

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The YouTube teams started tracking this metric back in 2017, and the company uses it as a primary metric to measure their responsibility work. YouTube says the most recent VVR is at 0.16-0.18%, which means that out of every 10,000 views on YouTube, 16-18 come from violative content, down by over 70% when compared to the same quarter of 2017.

VVR aims to provide context on violative content’s impact according to the duration it was accessible on the platform and views generated. For instance, the turnaround time to remove a violative video does not capture the actual impact of violative content on the viewer. It would play an important role in understanding the comparison of occurrences such as a violative video that got 100 views but stayed on the platform for more than 24 hours with content that reached thousands of views in the first few hours before removal.

The YouTube teams would continually review and update policies, and work with experts to limit violative content on the platform.