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YouTube is testing the ability to see live watch counts on any video

Out of all of Google’s services, it always seems like YouTube is the one that has the most tests going on at any given time. Today, a user has discovered (via Android Police) that the YouTube app for Android is showing the number of people watching a specific video at any given time.

What’s happening here should be simple enough to understand. When watching a video on YouTube you can see how many other YouTube users are watching that video at the same time as you in real-time. This count takes the place of the standard view count, but there’s no obvious way to change that back, at least from what can be seen in the screenshots below.

This is one in-app test that hasn’t previously popped up on any other YouTube platform. For the web, especially in the Creator Studio, this sort of feature would make a lot of sense, so we can only hope that this is the first step towards that. For the end user, this feature is cool, but seems pretty useless. Live watch counts seems like something that creators would find much more valuable. Regardless, the feature is popping up for various users now, but it seems like a pretty limited rollout.


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