YouTube has always had an issue when it came down to video view counts – how did they determine whether or not the views that a video was getting actually came from real people? In the past YouTube would essentially freeze view counts once they hit 301 and then verify the incoming traffic. Once they determined what the actual view count was the associated video would be updated. Officially YouTube stated that this used to take a matter of hours – however I know MANY video creators who had 301 view counts for days on end.
As of today YouTube will no longer freeze view counts, instead they’ve updated their algorithm and now claim to be able to immediately identify which views are real and which aren’t.
One would think that YouTube creators would be ecstatic over the new change – however it seems there are plenty of people that are experiencing more problems with the new system than they did with the 301+ concept. Lots of video creators have reported seeing view counts not reflecting what was shown with real-time analytics. Personally I think this new algorithm will take some time to fully perfect – and as such I fully expect a decrease in video views across the board – at least until this is all finalized.