My best guess is that Submerged is "home page content", meaning it gets broadly promoted and placed on the home page of many people who have no concept of the channel yet and therefore are likely to scroll over it. It's something YouTube is trying to push to a generalist audience who will always be less likely to click. Meanwhile TFC is a habit-based video. It has a very high likelyhood to get a click from a returning viewer, but isn't a great pitch to a random person on a homescreen so YT doesn't promote it as much. This means Submerged gets many people playing it for a few frames as they scroll over it while TFC doesn't.

If my theory is correct ... this means channels who have a strong, loyal returning audience got a much smaller bump (in this case half as big) and so they now look like they get fewer relative views! Since audiences and sponsors both tend to view high view counts as a signal, this is a real disadvantage!

(🧵2/2)