People tend to obsess over how many views their videos receive on sites like YouTube. Unfortunately, what they don’t understand is that a view often doesn’t mean much. And that’s because of how video views are tracked. Back in 2008 TubeMogul released a study that showed nearly all video views are counted as simple play-starts. That means if someone clicked the play button…regardless if they watched for 1 second or the entire video…it was counted as a view. Last week, TubeMogul released an update on their video view study, and the results weren’t any brighter.
In fact, they were largely unchanged. Across the most popular video sites, if someone watches your video in it’s entirety, only half the video or only one second, that is counted as a view. But it gets better. If a viewer refreshes their browser, that gets counted as a view. And if your videos are embedded on another web site…while also being set to autoplay…a view is counted every time the page with your video is loaded (keeping in mind that in this situation, a person may never even see your video buried on the page somewhere).
For the last scenario, YouTube is the only service that doesn’t count embedded videos set to autoplay as views. They enforced this rule because of Avril Lavigne. A while back some of her fans tried to propel her videos to the top of YouTube’s all-time watch list through embedded autoplays, so YouTube squashed the embedded autoplay view.
So as a video producer, your video view counts are a pretty inaccurate way of gauging how many people are actually ingesting your content. And for video advertisers, well, they are often being robbed blind.
Great info, Dave.
How WOULD you gauge views? And what do you tell sponsors?
Thanks
From what I can tell, even YouTube does not count a page refresh. I tried this with some videos and the count did not change.