Do you know view counting system of YouTube ?

August 22, 2020

 

How Does YouTube Count Views? 

It’s not as simple as the number of clicks your video gets. If someone sits and refreshes your video over and over without letting it play for any significant time, those refreshes won’t be recorded as views.



  There are so many methods that go into the calculation.

1. Not Everyone Who Clicks Adds to Your View Count YouTube doesn’t provide a clear definition of what counts as a view, but we know that someone clicks on your video, and clicking away right away doesn’t count. That’s how we know that watch time is a factor. Some studies conclude that a full 30 seconds need to be viewed to register as one view, but there is no way to know for sure.

2. How Does YouTube Count Views?

 YouTube wants to make certain that views are coming from individuals and not from bots. So, during the first couple of hours after you publish a video, YouTube seems to be stricter about what they count. The views which are counted are the ones that YouTube believes to be legitimate. Sometimes, it ends up skipping legitimate views for the sake of discretion. Once this window of time passes, it is likely that you will see the view counter start to update a lot more frequently. The counter could still revert to updating slower and more hesitantly, though, if YouTube’s algorithm thinks it’s detecting something fishy.

At the moment, your view count can even be frozen tentatively, till the youtube algorithm can confirm the views you're receiving. This is done to ensure a fair and positive experience for everyone who creates content. View counts can be adjusted by the algorithm in either direction.

3. How Does YouTube’s View Count Algorithm Work?

Termed by many as one of the most boggling algorithms of all time, it is really hard to decode the complete dynamics of the YouTube view count algorithm. There are few checks you can run yourself to try to take it out. If you upload a video and then set it as unlisted it won’t get any public views so you can experiment by doing things like watching for different lengths of time and seeing what gets counted. You’ll have to use a computer in a different location and make sure the account is not the same as the one you used to upload the video. Now, you need to watch the video for roughly 15 seconds. The key here is to keep it less than 30 seconds. You will see that the view did not add to the count.

If you repeat this process on multiple computers at varying locations and with different accounts and you are likely to find the same result. However, if you watch it for 30 seconds or longer it is likely that the count will go up. We are adding ‘likely’ here because, despite this 30-second rule which has been decoded, there are other factors that might contribute to whether a view is counted as well as other automated scanning techniques at play. Try to watch the same video numerous times in a single day. You will find that the count will add up at first, but after some time it will stop.

YouTube knows that plenty of times humans replay some videos again and again when they really enjoy them, and so they want to factor replays into the youtube algorithm

because they suggest quality. However, to avoid spam views, the counter will stop after a certain point.

4. Account monitoring Factors - Few Viewers Do not Count

Something else that can affect whether a view is counted is the behavior of the account which watches it prior to landing on your video’s watch page. Sometimes, YouTube might feel that there is an increased chance a particular account is actually a bot, and then views from that account might not be added. One way that YouTube might flag an account as a potential bot is if it is jumping between videos directly without navigating through recommendations, the search engine, or the account’s subscriber feed (how are they getting between these watch page URLs if they aren’t clicking on anything YouTube can record?). To add to it, if the viewer is watching each of the videos for almost 30 seconds exactly (or less) there is an increased probability that it is not an individual but a bot or we can say a human viewing the bare minimum as part of a view exchange program.

Any bot-like action will result in an account’s views not being added to your view count.

 5. The Skip & Skim It’s not uncommon for viewers to watch a video for say five seconds, skip forwards a bit and watch for another ten seconds as they look for a specific part. It is tough to say whichever skipping during a video, but watching multiple portions approximately 30 seconds, would youtube logarithm count as a view or not.

6. Frozen YouTube View Counts

In some cases, YouTube will suspend a view count in order to verify that it is true.

When the count is unfrozen, the count may jump up as views are validated or it can go down if YouTube detects a problem. You can use YouTube’s analytics reports monitoring an estimate of your potential views, but there is no assurance that this data will completely match your official view count. 7. The 301 Mark You may have seen a lot of videos that have a stagnant count of 301 views.

The youtube algorithm behind the view count method believes that any video which has gained higher than 300 views has the potential to influence individuals' perception of quality on YouTube. They do not want the homepage to be crowded with artificially popular videos. The employees at YouTube then manually verify whether the views obtained so far are legitimate or fake. Once the employees are sure that the views are legit, the counter is unfrozen and you will see an upward swing. Meanwhile, the period when the view count is frozen every valid view is still counted, just not added instantly.

Once the YouTube team is sure that your videos are not getting fake traffic, your view count will be updated to include views that were registered during the frozen phase.

Conclusion of this article:

In short, we know YouTube expects a viewer to watch a video for around 30 seconds before it counts a view, that views from suspicious accounts are not counted, and that YouTube can decide to freeze your view count while they review your views. They are protecting the site from becoming saturated with videos that only look popular because of bots. Ultimately, ‘how does YouTube count views’ isn’t a question anyone but YouTube can answer for sure, but we do know it isn’t as simple as ‘a view is someone clicking on your video’.


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