Do you ever wonder why youtube views look different across the video watch page, search page and analytics? There is a very simple explanation for this. YouTube often freezes a view count when it is suspicious that the views might be fake or spammy. This allows employees to manually verify that the views are legitimate. Once the views are verified, the count will be unfrozen and you will see the view count go up.
The view count is the number of times that your video has been watched. In order for a view to be counted, a user must purposely click the play button and watch it for at least 30 seconds. YouTube also checks the user’s IP address to spot spamming. If they find any sign of this, the video is excluded and the view count will not increase.
Despite this, there are still some cases where the view count can be inaccurate. For example, if the video is embedded on a website and it plays automatically when users scroll through their newsfeeds, this can be counted as one view even though the user has not actively clicked on the video to start watching. This is considered spamming and YouTube will exclude and retrospectively remove the views from that particular video and from the user account and IP address.
Another common cause of incorrect view counts is when viewers rewatch videos multiple times without pausing in between. This can be counted as a single view only if the rewatch is done within a few hours of the previous view. This is to prevent people from spamming the watch count by rewatching their videos over and over again in an attempt to get more views. youtube views