A view on Youtube is a video play that is completed for the platform’s minimum watch duration. It is one of the least important factors when it comes to ranking a video, but it does provide a general indication of a video’s popularity and success.
To qualify as a view on Youtube the video must be initiated by a user on purpose, and at least 30 seconds must be spent watching it. Previously, it was easy to spam or fake views on Youtube but the platform has now made it nearly impossible for marketers to do this because Youtube tracks the IP address of the viewer and watches out for suspicious behaviours.
YouTube will also exclude views from accounts that they believe are bots. They will flag accounts that jump from video to video without navigating through the recommendation engine or search engine, are constantly refreshing the YouTube watch page, or have extremely high view counts for a number of videos that aren’t linked in any way.
Views can also be tampered with by spamming a video’s comments. This can include spamming other viewers to click on a link outside of YouTube or simply leaving repeated, identical comments on a video. These will be marked as spam and can lead to the account being banned from YouTube. You can report a spam comment by clicking on the three vertical dots in the top right corner of the YouTube screen. youtube views