I’m sure you’ve seen this before: When you are watching a video on YouTube on a popular channel, the view count usually quickly rises to 301 then stops for quite a while. It may have baffled you why it does that, but according to a video posted by Numberphile, they explained this phenomenon:
What basically happens is that if a video generates a lot of interest and the view count rises exponentially, the view count rises to 301. Initially, YouTube had originally planned it to be 300, but a coder made an error to the code which allowed an extra viewer count after which terminates the view count on the user front. At the background however, YouTube used that time to verify the view count tally to prevent incidences of bots inflating the viewer count.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI]
Now, YouTube announced on Twitter that they have done away with the 301+ view count notification and now the view counts will be counted in real time by an algorithm
We’re saying goodbye to 301+ and hello to more up-to-date video views. pic.twitter.com/33OQuOvxcs
— YouTube Creators (@YTCreators) August 5, 2015
Previously, as I explained before, the view counts whether from bots or real people were piled up and sorted afterwards. In this new era, YouTube now employs people and computers to verify these numbers. They watch the videos being uploaded on the various servers all over the world and are able to verify these views because they actually recorded in the background. This means now the views are sorted in real time, where they separate the real from the “fake”.
It is a late but welcome move by YouTube to finally implement this but in a way it is sad to see a popular YouTube idiosyncrasy disappear into oblivion.
