Having reliable YouTube view count data is critical to understanding your video’s performance. YouTube meticulously tracks views to ensure that they are real and that users have the best viewing experience. However, there are still ways to inflate the number of views. Whether through spam bots, malware, or refreshing the watch page, these tricks can have serious consequences for your channel. How YouTube Views Are Counted YouTube views are an important metric for videos and channels, especially those that use ads to generate revenue. They are counted as viewer-initiated plays of a video on the platform that last for at least 30 seconds. However, not all views are created equal. YouTube has strict guidelines to prevent phony views from skewing view counts and maintain accuracy. For instance, it doesn’t count replays if they are merely intended to artificially increase a video’s view count. It also won’t recognize someone as a viewer if they repeatedly refresh the watch page of a video to spam the site. This approach is taken to ensure that views are only accumulated when viewers genuinely engage with content. It also avoids artificial inflation of paid views to protect user privacy and ensure that advertising dollars are well spent. Does YouTube Count Repeat Views? YouTube views are an important metric to track for any video creator. They are also a key metric used by businesses that promote their content on YouTube. Views are a signal to viewers that the content is interesting and worth watching. To count as a view, a video must be played for at least 30 seconds by a human viewer. Repeat views of the same video are also counted. However, if a viewer watches the same video multiple times and continually refreshes the watch page to artificially increase the view count, YouTube will flag this behavior and stop counting these views. To avoid being flagged as a bot, it is best to watch videos in a logical sequence. For example, if you watch a video and then jump to another video without going back to the watched page of the first video or through recommendations, YouTube may detect this as bot behavior and stop counting these views. Does YouTube Count Your Own Views? YouTube does not count views from people watching their videos on their own accounts. This is because the video platform wants to verify that the people watching their videos are actual humans and not bots. In addition, it also does not count views from videos embedded on other websites that automatically start playing (how annoying is that?) and views from accounts that leave spam comments in the video’s comment section. Rewatching a video does count as a view, but only if the total watched time is over 30 seconds. It also doesn’t count to repeatedly refresh a video or reload the page in an attempt to increase the view count. YouTube will freeze a video’s view count once it reaches 300 views and then de-spams it by confirming that real humans were the ones to watch it. If you are promoting your online store with videos on YouTube, it is important to understand how views are counted so that your efforts are legitimate and will help you gain more followers. It is also important to remember that view counts don’t update instantly and may lag behind for a few hours while YouTube verifies them. Can You Refresh the Watch Page of a Video to Gain More Views? Getting more views on YouTube is a priority for many video creators. The more views you have, the higher your videos will rank in YouTube’s video carousel and on Google search results. To get more views, you need to create engaging content that your audience will want to watch. To do this, you need to understand your audience and their interests. YouTube’s system is designed to spot fake views and prevent them from affecting the real view counts of videos. It does this by examining the user’s browsing history and watching behavior. If a viewer is constantly refreshing the video and rewatching it to artificially increase the views, YouTube will flag them as a bot and reduce their viewing activity. In addition, YouTube only counts the first 4-5 replays of a video as a view. If you replay a video more than that, YouTube will consider this as spamming. This is because YouTube wants to make sure that the views being counted are real human viewers and not bots.
