YouTube videos are going to become more popular — without becoming more popular

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan just announced a change that will boost numbers for star podcaster Alex Cooper — and every other YouTube creator.

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for YouTube How popular is that viral video you just saw? That question is harder to answer than you'd think: Different platforms count "views" differently.

Now YouTube is moving to a standard more of its competitors use — which tells you a bit about the way YouTube views the competition.

YouTube is the world's biggest video platform.

Now it has figured out how to become bigger.

Even better: Google's video site is going to pull this off without spending a dime.

It's going to change the way it counts.

That's the upshot from a new policy the company announced Monday.

The details won't make much sense to you unless you're a professional YouTube watcher, but the gist is YouTube is going to be more permissive about the way it counts views — which means view counts are going to go up.

Crucially, this won't affect the way YouTube counts views when it comes to Things That Involve Money — things like figuring out how it shares ad revenue with creators, or totaling up how much exposure an advertiser's video received.

This change only affects "public views" — a purely cosmetic metric.

So why bother? YouTube says it's doing this on behalf of video creators who complain that YouTube's old system causes "confusion." But that doesn't fully explain it.

A slightly more useful answer is that other video platforms, like TikTok and Reels, already use a view-count system like the one YouTube is moving to, so this brings YouTube in sync with that.

But the most useful answer is that this will boost YouTube's numbers.