However, it can also be unnatural, like in cases where the link is embedded in an advertisement rendering the video. Do a lot of the views come from the same referral URL? This can be natural, such as if the only link leading to the video is from your blog and it got a lot of traffic.If a lot of views come from strange user agents, it’s a sign that a lot of those views might be bots. Do a lot of the views come from unusual or duplicate user agent strings? Sure, there are people running around using old versions of Safari or Internet Explorer, but not so many that it’s going to make up a significant portion of your view count.This can be legitimate behavior – if you like a song you might watch the video several times – but for less compelling or less repeatable content, it’s a lot less likely. Do a lot of the views come from the same IP address? It’s unlikely that the same person is watching the same video over and over.Do a lot of the views last under 10 seconds? A lot of fake views simply load the video and then leave.There are a lot of possible sources of fake views, so they had a lot to analyze. YouTube would be looking for signs that the views were fake in some way. They would analyze records and behavior of both old views that were recorded, and new views coming in while they audited everything. The view count would freeze at 301+, and they would set their algorithms loose on it. What they did is set a threshold, that being 300 views, after which they would trigger an audit.
There wasn’t enough processing power to audit all of them from the beginning, so YouTube didn’t bother to try. There are simply too many people uploading too many videos that barely get any attention at all. If you wanted to fake 140 views for your video, you could do so, and they wouldn’t even notice. Essentially, Google didn’t really care about videos with under 300 views.
Why this freeze? The answer was the YouTube view quality audit. While frozen, you would be unable to see a real, accurate view count. Sometimes it would even sit at this number for days or weeks before it changed back to a real number and started tracking again. You would see a video, and the view count would be listed as 301+, rather than an accurate number. This was the “ 301+ error” that so many people used to encounter. In years past, YouTube would stop any video that reached over 300 view views and halt the view count display.