If you are to go on the YouTube trending page, you are likely to find a lot of videos that have been played millions or hundreds of thousands of times in a short span of a couple of days. In case a video is doing exceptionally well, you will also find that a video has been on the trending page for a couple of days and some videos have amassed a lot of views (in the millions) in a few hours or a single day. Have you ever wondered how that has happened?
In this blog post, we will be breaking down how YouTube counts views. Another option is YouTube Records. There are videos with the highest number of views in YouTube history as well as those that attained one billion views in the quickest length of time. (Adele’s “Hello” is currently in first place, that only took 88 days before it reached this astounding view total, of one billion views) Where do those opinions originate? What precisely constitutes and does not constitute a “view”? YouTube has the solution for individuals who are interested or if you’re a marketer trying to expand your plan onto a platform with over 2 billion subscribers.
The first question you will ask us is, “what exactly is a view in the world of YouTube?” Well, according to YouTube themselves, a view is basically the following:
- It has to be viewer initiated. This means that the viewer has to click on the video voluntarily.
- The view also needs to be despammed by YouTube’s algorithm.
- In other words, the view has to be done by a human and not by a robot and YouTube also needs to confirm that it is a legitimate view.
Do you also know about the magic number? It is 300. What does this mean? Well, when a YouTube video reaches 300 views, YouTube freezes all the counts of views to verify if these 300 views are legitimate or not. Its system starts keeping track of new views after the first 300. As soon as false views are discovered, they can be deleted.
The view counter returns to normal after the initial screening is complete, but YouTube will keep an eye out for phony views on every video. Why 300? The YouTube homepage cannot get crowded or have its algorithm thrown off by numbers below that.
But the formula was not so foolproof. In the early days of YouTube, when monetization was not a thing, many people just refreshed their page to increase their views. In the early days of YouTube, the founders did not think people would do this, so their detection system was not in place.
It was an assumption that every view on every video was intentional, by a human, and therefore, it did not need to be verified. However, in 2022, YouTube has gotten pretty good at recognizing fraudulent views. Some signs that they look for are as follows:
- The classic case of when the creator refreshes the site and gets more views will be counted as fraud and therefore, will not be counted in the total number of views. However, if a content creator has viewed their YouTube video once or twice, these one or two views will be counted towards their total views.
- A view gets deleted automatically if the YouTube algorithm feels that the view has been given by a virus or malware software that will harm the website.
- If the video is set up as autoplay, it will not be counted as a view for the YouTube algorithm.
Malware, or a program that helps send spam from your computer, and spambots can both be found using software in YouTube’s security system. To improve the efficiency of the filtering process, YouTube automatically deletes them.
Replays also do count as views, but these need to seem natural in nature. What this means is that in case YouTube thinks that you are spamming or refreshing the page to artificially increase the views on a YouTube video, then it will mean that these views will not be counted.
You also need to know that YouTube views are not unique. What this means is that replays and re-visits are counted in the view count. You can see your number of unique viewers in your YouTube analytics dashboard. YouTube views also get refreshed every 24 to 48 hours – this process is not instant in nature. A video used as a background on your website (i.e., one you embedded from YouTube) will not be taken into account.
It’s crucial to know how many people have watched your video. Based just on views, you may determine whether your content is worth watching, whether your title and thumbnail are intriguing, and whether your content is worth reading. You can successfully change your plan to expand your YouTube channel by tracking your YouTube views.
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