Like with most answers to these type of questions, its hardly one specific thing. Its most likely a variety of factors of:

Of course, the decline in viewership MUST be explained by some kind of counting error. It can’t possibly be that as we’ve entered a Golden Age of TV content, viewers are spending their screen time watching content created by actual professionals instead of glorified hobbyists.

Nothing is killing Channels. More Youtubers but not more stories. Ppl will start to have seen enough of that crap. I had after 2 minutes, others took longer. Its natural. PewPeeepeee had luck releasing during the peak boom. The peak has reached and now its going down again.

The new algorithm has been pretty good at getting me content I actually want to watch. I’m hoping it’ll get better at filtering out the channels I’ve said no to a hundred times already.

Or maybe people are binge watching shows that have new seasons out? Or perhaps people are just bored with the streamer content. I never understood the idea of watching people like Pewdiepie. I have a friend who streams games for the story, goes over the lore of it. I kinda get that, but I don’t get why you’d watch…

You mean I can’t make a living playing scary games and having a screaming tantrum all my life? Get the fu-*jumpscare* HOOOOGH!!! OH GOD! WHAWUZZAT!?

Buy my shirt.

Or maybe (hope hope hope) people are just getting tired of YouTube.

I know this may sound crazy but maybe the Youtube fad is just slowly dying.

It could also be that YouTube reached a peak in popularity, and usage is now on a slow downward slope.

This really should be corrected to top 49 Youtuber’s views are down across the board. One person can only watch one video at a time and maybe they are watching something else?

The reason there are not many competitors to YouTube is because it costs a massive amount of $ to maintain even a fraction of the amount of traffic YouTube gets. The ads pay for that. The ads also pay the thousands of content creators who would not have the $ otherwise to justify the time and effort it takes to make…

Youtube’s suggestion system has been horrible for years. If you search for even short videos on a particular content from time to time, let’s say videogame gameplay, you’ll be crippled with videogames-only suggestions for weeks. What if my interests are not only videogames ? What if I’d like to open myself to new…

That makes absolutely zero sense though, if they had something in place to keep third parties from getting accurate figures, then they’d either block it or make it look better than it really is, not worse.

So it has nothing to do with how boring some these guys are, and the people who were watching their videos (10 year olds at the time) grew up now and moved on.

The problem with that might that the difference between these 49 and the rest is so big, that if you were to include the rest, these 49 would probably be outliers.

So no one is taking into account that theres so many channels out there that having many subscriptions defeats the purpose of having your highlights everyday, plus its impossible to keep up with more than a handful of channels that release daily videos... Id think people are cleaning their youtube’s and focusing more…

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact so much of the content is cookie cutter content that is the same across the bored with a little variation per channel. When you flood the market eventually there will be a crash and while that hasn’t happened it could come.

So, it’s very likely that actual human views aren’t down, but the way Youtube measures views has simply improved. I’m sure you can buy YT views somewhere, the same as with FB likes and Twitter followers.

Exactly this, no analysis needed just straight up human behavior we will eventually tire of something and not use it anymore. I don’t trade every game I finish in just as I don’t unsub from every youtuber I don’t watch.

Ever changing social and economic culture of humans world wide. This is always how it goes. Things come and go.