YouTube views are a critical metric for businesses, especially those participating in the platform’s partnership program. In addition, video views can provide insight into a brand’s audience. They can tell you whether your video title is compelling, whether your thumbnail is effective, and what times of day are best to share a video.
However, there are many misconceptions about how YouTube views work and what constitutes a view. For example, some users may wonder if repeated viewings count as views and what the threshold is for counting them. Others may also be curious why the view count for a video can vary between the video watch page, search page, and analytics.
Generally, any time that a viewer initiates an intended play of a video and watches it for 30 seconds or more counts as a view on YouTube. This applies to both mobile and desktop devices, and it includes views that happen via embedded videos and those shared on social media platforms like Facebook. Furthermore, live YouTube videos count as views, as long as they meet community guidelines and don’t contain any malware or spambots.
However, repeat viewings of a video only count as one view per user. Therefore, if you repeatedly watch the same video over and over again to increase your views, YouTube will consider this spamming activity. It will also flag your account to prevent you from doing this in the future. YouTube will stop adding new views to a video once it reaches a threshold, which is usually 300 views or more. YouTube views