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YouTube Addresses Funky January Video View Counts

Chris Atkinson | 3 months ago |

Earlier this month, you might have noticed a crazy spike in views from mobile devices, and you may have noticed just in the past week a low view count compared to all your other social data (comments, likes, favorites). Well, YouTube has just announced that they made a couple of mistakes in how they counted views this month, probably because in the ever-tinkering world of YouTube, they had some bugs they had to fix. We talked earlier about how YouTube was trying to eliminate black hat practices from the view counts, and this is probably just part of that...or something else.

YouTube's View Count Errors

One minor thing that YouTube is changing is the view count from videos that are not made public. In the past, if you had a video you were trying out and sharing with only your friends, it would count all of those views. Now, it won't. Views will go only to videos that are publicly available now. So the non-public views will be eliminated from the channel total.

The error for mobile view counts occurred January 11-15 and it was a bug in the system. And the error for low view counts from January 25-27 came from the legitimate view count verification that they claim is "a one-time error." So, everyone, go back to relaxing that YouTube will never mess this up again. Wait, why are you not relaxing?

Let's revisit this video from Some Grey Bloke on YouTube changes:

About the Author - Chris Atkinson

Chris Atkinson joined ReelSEO in 2011. He is a longtime film and television reviewer, and has almost two decades of experience in the theater industry. He also writes on his personal blog - http://nymoviereviews.com. View All Posts By - Chris Atkinson

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What do you think? ▼

appstorechronicle
fricken youtube!!!!
http://twitter.com/DomSoar Dominick Soar
Hmm was wondering if this was going to tackle my problem, doesn't look like it.
Does anyone know of a way to get around the fact that embedded videos with a custom image overlaid on them (which you then click to open the video in a lightbox or similar) need to be set to autoplay or require two clicks?
The problem comes from the fact YouTube doesn't count autoplays, but I don't see why what I'm doing would be against their interests - I'm just using our own play-button style overlay images on my embeds to make the page holding the videos look nicer, not gaming anything...
The only way I have of tracking these embedded views is via Google Analytics onClick events, which gives an indication but nothing as detailed as YouTube's stats.