To reduce dislikes harassment affecting mostly smaller content creators, YouTube decided to hide the dislike count across the platform at the end of 2021. However, the number of dislikes is still available for owned YouTube channels in the YouTube Studio.
The YouTube API was updated accordingly: dislike count is no longer available as a public metric.
YouTube based their decision on an experiment. They found out that thanks to hiding the dislikes, viewers and commenters were less likely to leave a dislike and engage in targeted harassment. You can learn more about the initiative directly from YouTube.
What is the impact on Emplifi Analytics?
As of December 13, 2021, the dislike count is no longer available or updated for YouTube channels added as a public profile to the platform. The dislike count for videos published before the cut-off date will still be visible and factored into your metrics; however, the dislike count will not be updated after December 13, 2021. Videos published after this date will show “NA” under the dislike count metric.
The change will also impact some of the post level (YouTube videos) and profile level (YouTube channels) metrics in Emplifi Analytics. Public data-based metrics, for example. Interactions, Interactions per 1K or Engagement rate, will no longer take dislikes into account.
How can I find dislike count for YouTube channels I own?
The dislike count will still be available for profiles you own and added to Emplifi and for content by those profiles.
To see the number of dislikes, you’ll need to make sure you’ve connected the YouTube Insights of all the relevant YouTube channels you own. The YouTube Insight connection is available in the Data Connections tab in Settings.
The number of dislikes will be retained as a standalone metric for your videos in the Content Feed. It will also still be included in your Engagements metric in Content Feed and Dashboard. For more information about Engagements, consult this article.
If you have some more questions on how to retrieve this metric, please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or our Customer Support Team.