This week I’ve discovered that YouTube has some issues when it comes to counting the number of views of its videos. Why is this important? Well, when it comes to generating buzz around a campaign, it’s useful to know how you’re getting on. We started promoting a YouTube video this week, but on a day that it was tweeted by Stephen Fry, generating 6,000 hits to a page with an embedded video in a matter of hours, only 312 views were displayed on YouTube.
After digging around various forums it turns out that I’m not alone in experiencing this. YouTube has posted an explanation on its community forum:
Recently we have seen questions about why some YouTube video view counts “freeze” around 300 views. To help prevent confusion, we wanted to post a quick explanation of what’s going on. View counts are extremely important to our community, so we work hard to ensure those view counts are accurate. Occasionally, when a video becomes popular quickly, it takes our computers longer to make sure those views are accurate. This means a video’s viewcount may not update for several hours, sometimes allowing ratings and comments on the same video to climb temporarily higher than the views. So if you see your video views aren’t moving, or that your video’s comments and ratings are moving faster than your views, don’t worry. If you’re still getting views, the count should update soon.
Looking at the thread, not many people have been that happy with the explanation, reporting that it can take days or weeks for the views to be unfrozen. YouTube is very vague about what constitutes a view – ie how long, self views and so on – although understandably it wants to take measures to ensure that views are ‘real’.
For the vid that we’ve been promoting, it’s now showing over 4,000 views, so it has started to add them in chunks, but given that our bit.ly stats show that over 10,000 people have viewed the page and also having had a look at the insight stats, I’m sceptical that the counter’s working properly.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Its important to understand that youtube is not the only show in town when it comes to web video campaigns. Indeed, for b2b communications it makes more sense to host your content yourself on your own dedicated video landing page. One such platform is provided by http://www.flimp.net where you can create your own video site and then distribute it to target audiences via video email, SEO, video SEO, viral forward to a friend and hyper links for social media sites, blogs etc- and which then enables you to measure not only views, but more importantly response. You have full control over the distribution, it looks more professional, and can be measured in real time by email address. I am not saying dont use Youtube- but check out the other options as well
regards Sean