YouTube views are a crucial part of the digital marketing world. They’re a way to measure how popular your videos are on a platform that is constantly changing with the times. Views may seem like an artificial section of your analytics, but it’s important to understand how the numbers are compiled and how that can impact your content’s performance.
What counts as a youtube video view?
Views are counted when a video is played by a user with the intent to watch. Unlike other social media platforms, YouTube has a more stringent definition of a “view.” A video must be watched for 30 seconds or more to count as a view. This applies to the video being viewed on the platform itself, embedded videos, and even videos that are shared on other sites such as Facebook.
It didn’t take YouTube long to figure out how video creators were trying to game the system. One common strategy was to refresh a video’s page and watch it multiple times in a day to increase the view count. This was called a “view farming” tactic. Now, however, if you continuously refresh a video’s page, it will be flagged by YouTube and the view count will stop increasing. In order to have a more accurate view count, YouTube has a team that is constantly weeding out phony views. If a video looks suspicious, the site will automatically delete it. This helps keep the site clean and safe for users to enjoy. youtube views