YouTube Ends 301+ View Count Mystery

It's the end of an era – YouTube will no longer be stopping view counts on videos at 301+ views. While the comments kept coming, the views stopped. It was a legendary break in the system. Or so people thought. In reality, Google has been automatically stopping views on YouTube videos at 301, checking the views at that point individually to make sure they weren't from spam bots, then releasing the video's counts into the wild. All that ends today.

According to Google, up until now their YouTube process began with a recording of views "centrally", made to wait until they were verified as real before they could move forward. As such, whenever a video passed 300 views, YouTube's view count would freeze. Google then checked the video (somehow or another) for spam views.

After a few hours of being checked for spam, and being stuck and 301+ views, Google would update the video with the real view count with "validated views."

Today that's done. Now Google suggests they're using a different process on YouTube to make the 301+ go away.

Now the views are counted as they're recorded, adding up as they go, while they review the views they're not so confident about. From here on out you can expect YouTube views to be a lot more accurate, right from the start.