See the views that count.
Since August 24, 2026, YouTube counts a view from the first frame of playback. RealView puts the old 30-second engaged view back on every screen in Studio, and paints the charts red so you always know which figure you are looking at.
Free, no account needed.
The number went up. Your audience did not.
On August 24, 2026 YouTube changed what a public view means: it is now counted the moment a video starts playing, the way Shorts have been counted since 2025. The old, stricter definition was renamed engaged views and survives in the analytics API as ENGAGED_VIEWS, but Studio leads with the new figure everywhere. Earnings and Partner Program eligibility still run on the engaged figures, so the number that matters is the one Studio now hides. The gap is real, and biggest exactly where you look most often: the last week.
RealView asks YouTube’s own analytics service for the engaged figures over exactly the same dates, and shows them in place of the raw ones. The number will be lower. That is the whole point: it leaves out everyone who clicked away within the first few seconds.
| Range | Views | Engaged |
|---|---|---|
| 7 days | 24 | 11 |
| 28 days | 60 | 47 |
| 365 days | 953 | 938 |
Everywhere Studio shows views.
A screen is only relabelled once every figure on it has really been converted, so a raw count is never captioned as an engaged one.
Analytics
The headline card, its comparison figure and daily chart, the summary sentence and every table’s view column. Channel, video and playlist scopes.
Realtime
The 48-hour card with its hourly chart and top-videos table, queried over exactly the hours the card draws.
Dashboard
The channel summary card, top content, and the latest-video card with its “6 of 10” ranking rebuilt and reordered by engaged views.
Content tab
Lifetime view counts in the video list, looked up per video.
Breakdowns
Traffic sources, geography, devices, age and gender, subtitle languages, interests. Two-way splits and the All, Videos, Shorts and Live tabs each get their own figures.
Charts
Every converted chart is painted red so you always know which figure you are looking at. Turn the red off and the numbers stay engaged.
Same service, same dates, different metric.
- Studio asks for its data.Every card in Studio loads its figures from YouTube’s analytics service, and those figures are raw views.
- RealView asks the same question again.One extra request per screen, for the engaged metric over exactly the same dates, using the session you are already signed in with.
- The numbers are swapped in place.Only the figures change. Column names stay as Studio configured them, so nothing breaks, and the wording on the page is corrected once the numbers really did.
Curious about the details? The README walks through every endpoint and edge case.
Nothing leaves your browser.
RealView runs only on studio.youtube.com and asks for a single permission: storage, to remember its four switches. The engaged figures are held in memory and never written to disk. No servers, no accounts, no analytics of its own.
Your channel is not modified. RealView changes what Studio shows you. Nobody else sees anything different, and turning the main switch off puts Studio back exactly as it was.
- Runs only on studio.youtube.com
- One permission: storage
- No data sent anywhere
- Figures kept in memory only
- Open source, GNU GPL v3
- Off switch restores Studio instantly
Get fixes before the store does.
Every release goes to GitHub the moment it ships. The Chrome Web Store copy follows once Google has reviewed it, which can take a few days. If a fix on the updates page is not in your store version yet, load the zip yourself.
Needs Google Chrome 111 or newer.
- Download the latest zip and unzip it. Put the
RealView-extensionfolder somewhere permanent, such as Documents. Chrome loads it from there every time it starts. - Open
chrome://extensionsand turn on Developer mode, top right. - Click Load unpacked and choose the
RealView-extensionfolder itself. - Turn off the store copy if you have it, so the two do not run side by side. Then open studio.youtube.com and check the main Analytics card reads Engaged views.
Two things to know. Chrome shows a “Disable developer mode extensions” notice at startup for any extension loaded this way; dismiss it. And an unpacked build does not update itself: to move to a newer version, replace the folder’s contents with the new zip. The store copy updates on its own.
Four switches
Click the RealView icon in the toolbar.