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How Does YouTube Count Views?
Posted: Mar 24, 2020
YouTube, undoubtedly, has changed the face of online earning and digital marketing in the past few years. You post a video, gather a requisite number of views, monetize, and earn a lot of money. However, had it been that simple, half of the world would have become millionaires by now!
Creating videos that strike a chord with the masses is a challenge in itself. However, even if you manage to create high-quality viral content, the challenge begins only after that.
- this is the question most YouTubers are looking for answers to.
There used to be a time when getting views on your YouTube videos was rather simple and uncomplicated. However, with time, YouTube has evolved, has become smarter, and has devised new algorithms to count the video views. This has made it far trickier to get a large number of views on YouTube videos.
The obvious way of increasing Views, that's redundant now
YouTube, in its early days, counted the views based upon the number of times the video is loaded. What this meant is that even if the same person loads a video, again and again, it will increase the number of views on the video. Traditionally, YouTubers have exploited this loophole in YouTube's views counting technique to get hundreds and thousands of views on their videos in a short period of time. However, once YouTube realized this way of gathering fake views on the videos, they have brought about key changes to their views counting algorithm.
How does YouTube count number of views now?
301 views - The Tripping Point
YouTube still uses the same old algorithm of calculating the views based on the number of times it is loaded, but for the first 300 views only. This is because 300 is a small number in the scheme of things on YouTube and is rather insignificant. However, the number of views freezes once a video reaches 301 views. What happens after the 301st view, let's see.
Beyond 301 Views
After a video has completed the first 300 views, and hits 301, by whatever means - fair or unfair, YouTube's algorithm freezes the number of views from increasing any further. This is because, after this point, the algorithm makes sure that the views gathered thus far are from genuine sources, and not fake ones. This is done manually by someone sitting in YouTube's office. At this point, the fake and redundant views are deleted, and further new views are added only if they are from genuine and legitimate sources. Thus, you have to make sure you are not getting views in any unfair way.