Earlier this month, you might have noticed a crazy spike in views from mobile devices, and you may have noticed just in the past week a low view count compared to all your other social data (comments, likes, favorites).  Well, YouTube has just announced that they made a couple of mistakes in how they counted views this month, probably because in the ever-tinkering world of YouTube, they had some bugs they had to fix.  We talked earlier about how YouTube was trying to eliminate black hat practices from the view counts, and this is probably just part of that…or something else.

YouTube’s View Count Errors

One minor thing that YouTube is changing is the view count from videos that are not made public.  In the past, if you had a video you were trying out and sharing with only your friends, it would count all of those views.  Now, it won’t.  Views will go only to videos that are publicly available now.  So the non-public views will be eliminated from the channel total.

The error for mobile view counts occurred January 11-15 and it was a bug in the system.  And the error for low view counts from January 25-27 came from the legitimate view count verification that they claim is “a one-time error.”  So, everyone, go back to relaxing that YouTube will never mess this up again.  Wait, why are you not relaxing?

Let’s revisit this video from Some Grey Bloke on YouTube changes: