The holy grail of YouTube success is considered to be the number of views a video has. Not just for bragging rights, but larger view counts can also boost your earnings from AdSense and boost your rankings in Google. But is this always the case? The truth is no. Believe it or not there are different types of views and YouTube (which is owned by Google) has continued to enhance its view count algorithms to determine the types of views a video is receiving. After all, YouTube needs to create a system that advertisers have faith in – that they can trust the view counts and that there are real viewers behind the views. This is the centerpiece of their business model.

So what type of video views does YouTube not count? (YouTube has a sort of algorithm audit system which is automatic and run multiple times is why view counts often drop after a period of time as the system disqualifies certain views). The easiest target for YouTube is Bot views. These are automated computer programs known as web crawlers. These views are easily detected by YouTube and are typically deleted immediately. Generally, YouTube does not count views that are for less than 10 seconds. These typically come from clickfarms, which are humans clicking on a video and quickly leaving to go to another video or another IP address. Multiple views from the same IP address can count unless the user is refreshing repeatedly with the intent to increase views. YouTube also knows many spammy IPs and bans views from them appearing on the counter. It is also believed that views from embedded videos that start automatically do not count (YouTube believes that automatic starting videos hurt the user experience).

So the importance of the number of views on a YouTube video is clear, but the quality of these views is of primary importance to YouTube. There are ways to increase your quality views. First you need to optimize the metadata on the video. That would be the title, the description and the tags. Embed the video on your website as well as on social media such as Facebook, twitter and Pinterest. Furthermore, encourage engagement by the use of annotations (clickable text or images shown on the screen as the video plays). Use this to give the viewer the ability to click on your website or to encourage the viewer to become a subscriber. This video does a good job of explaining how to use annotations effectively:

Buying YouTube views is not inherently dangerous if you purchase the right type of views. The key is to make sure that you are buying views that are high retention views from multiple IPs. We provide such services (click the link above in this paragraph to go the page that offers this service). YouTube considers high retention views (meaning that the view last for more than 70% of the length of the video) as viable and counts them. This is a very efficient method to enhance the number of views on a video. We have been one of the longest providers of this service in the marketplace and have a history of providing quality and permanent YouTube video views.

Clearly views are a key element in the success of a video. It’s important that you have quality views as we have discussed in this post. We will leave you with this tip: The view counter on the public video is more of an estimate than an actual count. What you want to use is YouTube Analytics, which is part of Google Analytics and available to all YouTube uploaders, to get accurate and real time view counts on your video. It has many other helpful analytics.