YouTube Views – Why Do They Vary So Much?

YouTube views are a holy grail of online video marketing. They’re the metric that proves your videos are being consumed and shared by real people, and they can lead to additional opportunities like advertising on YouTube. However, YouTube views can sometimes be confusing to understand and measure. For example, view counts can differ between the video watch page, search page, and analytics. This can make it difficult for marketers to track their progress and make informed decisions about their YouTube strategy.

To understand why YouTube video views seem to fluctuate so much, it’s important to know what counts as a view on YouTube. A view is counted when a user watches a video on the YouTube website for at least 30 seconds. This includes repeat views (though not every repeated video will be counted). Additionally, the viewer must be signed in to YouTube and must be using a desktop browser.

It’s also worth noting that a video can only be counted as one view per unique user. If someone is watching your video on multiple devices or accounts, only the first view will be counted. This is to prevent spamming and other fraudulent activity. YouTube has software that detects malware, spambots, and other types of fraudulent activity. If a video has more than 300 views, it will temporarily freeze the view count so YouTube employees can manually check and delete fraudulent views. Once this is done, the views will continue to update.