We’ve all seen it when we YouTube but none of us have ever paused to ask ourselves why? Why does the latest video from this ultra cool YouTuber I’ve subscribed to have over 5000 likes but only 301+ views?
More often than not, the 301+ views has been made into a meme, with many speculating that YouTube simply didn’t have the means to keep up with the views a video got once it went viral. In a way, that was true, but for slightly different reasons.
The way the YouTube view counter worked was by recording the views centrally, i.e, it would lob all the views made from genuine people and those made from Arnold Schwarzenegger look alike bots into a single metaphorical basket. YouTube then used to freeze the view counter of a video once it got 300 views (hence the infamous 301+ views) and the hours during which the view counter was frozen would be spent weeding out fake views from spam accounts and the same bots that once plagued the comment section of every YouTube video. No DaveMinecraft12417, I will not subscribe to your channel. Once the views were verified, the view counter would be updated to reflect it and it would be smooth sailing from thereon.
Now there were a lot of past tenses in that paragraph for a reason: YouTube has updated its view counter to display verified views in real time (or as close as it can get to that) while weeding out the spam views, bots and cats refreshing videos of themselves.
This new and improved view counter comes just a few days after the YouTube player itself saw an elegant update. Gone was the opaque timeline that was past its prime and in was the new transparent timeline of the future, because transparent things are quite simply put, cool. The player is visually now akin to its mobile counterpart and there’s a reason for that: the average length of a session someone on a mobile device would spend on YouTube is over 40 mins, up by more than 50% from last year. With these impressive statistics it makes sense for YouTube to update their browser based player since people frequently switch between the two.
The new player has a transparent timeline
This isn’t the first time YouTube has revamped its services due to its mobile viewers, for instance it recently updated its Android and iOS app to feature fullscreen portrait videos since it was a popular way for YouTubers to take videos from while on their phones. Personally I think it’s a crime to not shoot in landscape, but let’s save that discussion for later.
