Why is the view count for videos at YouTube clearly wrong, and is this always the case?

Often with very popular videos I see a ridiculous view count. See this video from Google, for instance:

See the view count here: http://i.stack.imgur.com/YV7yO.png

Clearly, a video can not have 305 views but 22,000+ likes. I have seen this happen before, at least some months ago. I am wondering:

Is this counter always off, or are there was that I can be sure this value is a correct, 'live' count of the views?
Do you have any idea why this is happening? Surely YouTube should have the technical capacity to solve an issue like this?!

youtube

2012-04-05 01:20
by NoName

I'd very much like an answer to this question too, out of curiosity, however it's not suitable for StackOverflow - Bojangles 2012-04-05 01:22

Voted off-topic by me, sorry. This is a support question for YouTube, not a programming issue. Investigating/understanding the issue likely requires access to YouTube internals, so it's likely not something you can practically solve unless you work for YouTube - Kaz 2012-04-05 01:23

Possibly, could it mean that "viewed" means that the video was completely viewed from beginning to end? This is a completely wild guess, not backed by so much of a trivial experiment. But: would you want your video to be marked viewed if it's 10 minutes long, and people stop it after 10 seconds - Kaz 2012-04-05 01:25

-1

Likely due to caching of view stats

2012-04-05 01:37
by vamur

That video was posted today April 4th, 2012. It currently appears as only 305 views but has 23,000 likes and 750 dislikes. It also has way more than 305 comments.

My guess is that views is updated on an hourly or daily basis. So it could be off until the next time youtube does a calculation on the number of visits. My guess is that this is due to avoiding duplicate views for the same IP Address. It could be using cookies as a way of determing if it's unique view as well. At any rate it may not be able to update the view count instantaneously so it has to do it on a regularly scheduled interval or simply when the servers have time to recalculate it.

I only bothered going to the 100th page of comments as I don't see a way of going to the very last comment. The last entry on the 100th page was only 1 hour ago. So I'm guessing it is a very recent addition and must have spread so quickly via tweets. So maybe it only had 305 views an hour ago. I'll check in an hour and let you know if the views bumped up further.

EDIT

After a bit more research the video was updated 11 hours ago by google. So I'm not guessing that it is not calculated hourly. It must be calculated every 12 hours or 24 hours. As one other has suggested this may be due to server side caching and not part of calculation or it could be due to both. Unless we know a programmer at google we may never know.

EDIT 24 hours after video was posted it has 1,870,649 views and 43,917 likes and 1,659 dislikes. At this point I am assuming the views are cached or calculated based on some time period. It could also have something to do with the video being completely viewed or not but I don't think that would entirely explain the numbers and the huge delay in the number of views as compared to the likes and dislikes.

EDIT 32 hours after video was posted 4,807,821 views 52,066 likes, 2,040 dislikes. So I'd say for sure it's due to caching or some timed server side calculation updating the value.

2012-04-05 01:27
by Dan P

It seems that this is done to reduce the views on youtube as this site is making payments to people who have many views and they have some criteria due to which they are not willing to increase views of all types of videos. They are not paying for likes therefore likes can increase from views.

2017-05-20 12:09
by Nauman