YouTube changes how views are counted, Meta disables 750,000 accounts, and Disney+ strikes a deal with football creators

YouTube will count a view as soon as a video starts playing

From 24 August, the public view count on YouTube will take on a new meaning. The platform will begin counting a view as soon as a video starts playing. The same rule will apply across all content formats, bringing conventional videos closer to the system YouTube already uses for Shorts.

Creators are therefore likely to see their publicly displayed view counts rise more quickly. A higher number, however, will not automatically mean that viewers stayed to watch the video or that the channel earned more money. YouTube will retain its existing measurement methodology in Analytics through the engaged views metric. The change will not affect creators’ revenue or the eligibility requirements for the YouTube Partner Program. For monetisation and eligibility assessments, the platform will continue to use its existing engagement-based metrics, including engaged Short views and engaged watch hours.

YouTube says the change is intended to eliminate inconsistencies in how different formats are measured and give creators a more consistent picture of their content’s overall reach. YouTube announcement

Meta disabled 756,000 accounts it believes belonged to people under 16

Meta has published another summary of the impact of Australia’s social media ban for children under 16. Between the period immediately before the law took effect and the end of June, the company disabled 462,000 suspected accounts on Instagram and 294,000 on Facebook. In total, this amounted to 756,000 accounts that Meta determined might belong to Australians under 16. This does not necessarily represent the same number of individuals, as one person may operate multiple accounts.

Australia’s ban took effect on 10 December 2025, and Meta says it will continue removing additional accounts. The company uses artificial intelligence to estimate users’ ages by analysing contextual signals in their profiles, such as birthday posts or references to school years. It also reviews reports of suspected underage accounts and says it has made it more difficult for users whose previous accounts were removed to create new profiles.

Australia is the first country to introduce a nationwide minimum age of 16 for social media use. Enforcing the ban in practice remains difficult, however. Government data and independent studies cited by Reuters indicated that, during the first three months after the law took effect, more than eight in ten Australians under 16 were still using social media.

Netflix turned a Pinterest trend into a Bridgerton campaign

When promoting the latest season of Bridgerton, Netflix Australia did not use Pinterest simply as an advertising platform. It built the campaign’s creative concept around the Opera Aesthetic trend, which Pinterest included in its Pinterest Predicts forecast for 2026. Ornate interiors, theatrical fashion and a romantic atmosphere naturally matched the visual world of Bridgerton. Netflix therefore brought the trend directly into the campaign and also used the Pinterest Predicts label.

During the first phase, it ran trailers and cast-led content designed to build anticipation. Following the season’s release, the campaign shifted to scenes, shorter clips and additional video content.

The campaign combined Premier Spotlight Takeover, Max Width Video and Standard Video formats. According to Pinterest’s official case study, the Pin Awareness metric increased by 8.4 percentage points across the campaign. For creative assets labelled with the Opera Aesthetic trend, the increase reached 12.3 percentage points.

Creative carrying the Pinterest Predicts label also achieved an 83.6% higher video completion rate and a 66.7% lower cost per completed view than the campaign’s other creative assets. Pinterest case study

Disney+ moves into football shows built on YouTube

Streaming platform Disney+ has signed a one-year agreement with British sports platform The Overlap. It will become the headline sponsor of Stick to Football and the new format Stick to United with Wayne Rooney for the 2026/2027 season. The partnership also includes exclusive episodes and extended content for Disney+.

Stick to Football is hosted by Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Jill Scott, Ian Wright and Roy Keane. Forty new episodes will be produced and made available on Disney+ as well as existing platforms, including YouTube. Disney+ will receive a limited period of exclusivity for 20 of those episodes. The streaming service has also commissioned six additional episodes exclusively for its own catalogue.

The new show Stick to United will bring Wayne Rooney together with Mark Goldbridge, one of the most prominent figures in fan-driven football media. Fifty episodes are planned and will also be available through The United Stand’s YouTube channel. Extended versions of the episodes will be exclusive to Disney+.

Both shows will be available on Disney+ in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The partnership is particularly notable because the content will not disappear from YouTube behind a subscription paywall. Instead, Disney+ is combining sponsorship, temporary exclusivity and its own premium content.

ByteDance reaches agreement with Hollywood association after Seedance dispute

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance reached an agreement with the Motion Picture Association on 17 August. The association represents Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Amazon MGM Studios and Warner Bros. Discovery. The partnership concerns copyright protection in the Seedance video models and Seedream image models.

The agreement follows several months of dispute. In February, the Motion Picture Association called on ByteDance to end alleged copyright infringement and issued the company with a formal notice demanding more effective safeguards. Disney and other studios had warned that the generators were able to produce unauthorised content featuring copyrighted film characters or the likenesses of well-known actors.

ByteDance said newer versions of its models include stronger intellectual-property protections. The two sides will continue working together on additional safeguards as the capabilities of generative AI evolve.

The arrangement is not, however, a licensing agreement allowing ByteDance to use Hollywood studios’ catalogues freely. The published information also makes no mention of financial compensation or of resolving potential disputes over the data used to train the models.