It has really been some strange days on YouTube. All my channels have been running completely rampage and for a while I thought I had done something wrong and was punished by Google. The view-counter had completely stopped and for two full days my videos from ALL my channels had been seen by 0(zero) people.
Luckily I can check a lot of YouTube Insight's from all over the globe and quickly discovered they all looked the same. Most people don't have this option and have no way to discover it's not a local problem.
Yesterday YouTube set up a page reading this:
YouTube employs proprietary technology to prevent the artificial inflation of a video’s viewcount by spam bots, malware and other means. We validate views to ensure the accuracy of the viewcount of all videos beginning with the first view. This validation process becomes publicly visible when the viewcount reaches 300. At this point, the viewcount may slow or temporarily freeze until we have time to verify that all further views are legitimate. Rest assured that the views system is working as intended, and that the viewcount will update as soon as the system has verified the legitimacy of the views.
Known Issue: Viewcount outage from July 11th-July 18th
You may notice some inconsistencies between your Insight view count and public view count (e.g. watch page view count) for the week of July 11th. Please be assured that any views not currently updated are still being recorded. We hope to have any view count discrepancies resolved as soon as possible, but note that it may take a couple of days.- Insight and YouTube Analytics are missing some viewcount data from late July 11th to July 18th.
- Public viewcounts are missing some viewcount data over the same range, though it may not correlate to the missing Insight info (ie: though both incorrect, public viewcount may be different than the Insight numbers).
- Daily Stats, Daily Reports, and Weekly Reports are also affected.
- All views from July 18th forward are being counted correctly in both Insight and public viewcounts.
- All views from the outage period (7/11-7/18) will slowly be added back, however this may take some time and we don't have an ETA for this at the time being.
- Lastly, there should be no impact to your revenues from this month - AdSense reporting and earnings were not effected by this issue.
I seriously don't get it. If this was a planned operation by YouTube/Google, why weren't we informed in advance? And if a video is activated it has to count as a view, no matter if it's a bot or a person activating it. Otherwise our Insight's will become completely unreliable. We will never know if the information we get is a true representation or just what Google accepts. This is Google/YouTube saying a tree falling, with nobody around, doesn't make a sound.
I have just released two new videos in an ambitious experiment to move traffic out of YouTube and have been glued to my monitor to see the effects. On the video page, one of the videos has 1200 views but doesn't count any more. If I look at the Insight, it's 1800 but if I look at the graphs and add the days up, I get a third number. Two full days of information is completely gone and about 7 days looks completely distorted. YouTube tells us the information is stored and will be released later but how can we trust the information now? And why, oh why, don't you guys tell us in advance?
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