Does YouTube Count Your Own Video Views?

Many use YouTube to promote their businesses, brands or just use YouTube platform for their personal purposes. If you are just starting to create content on YouTube, you probably know that views don’t come easy. You need to regularly upload new content in order to build your viewership.

Almost all of us checked their first uploaded video on YouTube and refreshed to see if video has generated any new views. Do you remember those days? But then we questioned ourselves – will YouTube include my views to the total count of the video views?

In this article I will explain how YouTube’s video count algorithm works and does YouTube count your own video views.

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Let’s start!

How YouTube video views are counted?

Since 2018 January 30^th, YouTube rolled-out new update regarding their views count algorithm. This updated algorithm aimed to improve validation of views and overall system accuracy while counting views. In other words, YouTube wanted to make sure that views on your videos are gathered by real users and not by bots or other fake accounts.

It means that right after video publishing YouTube may not show all the views that video gathered, only the views that system thinks is valid are shown at that moment. Afterwards, when video views have been validated by algorithm, algorithm updates view count more frequently.

Before this update view count could stay frozen for some time until views legitimacy was being evaluated by the algorithm. Usually the tipping point was 301 views, that is why many people were noticing their video views being stuck at 301 views.

In conclusion, you may notice slight delay in views count just at the first few hours of your video upload. Afterwards, there shouldn’t be any delays as algorithm updates more frequently. Find more information regarding this update by clicking here.

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Which views exactly are counted?

As I have said earlier, YouTube wants to make sure that video views are coming from legitimate sources and real people. So, not all views are counted. Even not all views from real people are counted towards your video.

The requirements for views are:

1. User needs to self-initiate playing of the video. This means that if your video is auto-played or embedded in other website, then that particular view won’t be counted.
2. Video needs to be viewed for 30 seconds. If video has been viewed for less than 30 seconds, then that view won’t be counted too. If video has been skipped in parts and total watch-time of that video was longer than 30 seconds, then this will count as a legitimate view. There is an exclusion for videos shorter than 30 seconds.

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Does YouTube count your own views?

That’s an interesting question. At the beginning of YouTube it was easy to get many views in short period of time, as algorithm didn’t track anything and someone just could easily refresh the video and every time it would count that as a legitimate view.

However, with time YouTube’s algorithm got smarter. Now repeated video views are counted up to the certain point. There is no public information about that, neither YouTube explained anything in public, but it is believed that repeated views stop counting after 4^th or 5^th view in the same 24-hour span. So, don’t refresh your video many times as it won’t help you to get more than 5 video views.

To answer your question, YouTube counts only 4-5 views per day from the same user, anything more won’t go towards your view count. This strategy prevents spam/generated views. So, don’t bother doing that.

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I hope that after reading this article you understand how YouTube counts views on your videos and that repeated views are not counted towards your video. If you have anything to add up, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!