Yesterday I was involved in publishing a video a to YouTube that had some major PR power behind it—outreach to top bloggers as well as radio and TV exposure—so the video got a ton of views.  While the traffic to the video’s landing page skyrocketed, the view count of the video stayed stuck at somewhere just above 300 views for several hours.  Comments kept pouring in, the ratings number climbed, but the views stayed stuck.

Late today the number finally adjusted itself to a bit over 27,000 views.  A great number for the first day, but one that the users who helped make it happen couldn’t see—very frustrating.

After doing some searching I found this bit of unhelpful advice on the subject at the YouTube blog:

Video view counts reflect the YouTube community’s interests and the grassroots popularity of videos. We periodically make changes that allow us to display consistent view counts and accurately reflect a “real” view based on video consumption, video streaming and spam filtering. Unfortunately, a few people still try to artificially manipulate their video’s view counts. Some people game third-party view counts as well. That can make things unfair for everyone.

Recently, we found spamming issues associated with the view counts on a small number of videos. The inflated view count number on these videos will be frozen until actual views catch up to the published, artificial, view count. Also, a few people have commented that their view counts are updating more slowly. Occasionally the speed with which views update changes — sometimes it’s faster and sometimes it’s slower. But we are always working to make sure that the final view count numbers are an accurate reflection of the community’s interest.

In short, in the name of accuracy and fighting the dreaded video spammer, YouTube has departed from Google’s speed-first policy and slowed down the updating of view counts to allow for a thorough vetting of the numbers.

But, when technological fixes don’t exist, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be done.  Managing expectations and preparing your boss or client for this phenomenon well ahead of a launch can do wonders to keep folks from getting agitated or asking you to “fix the YouTube.”

If you’re in need of a positive spin, you may mention that many users speculate that long periods of stagnant video counts typically indicate that a video is quite popular and that its page has essentially been cached—served up without updates to save on processing power and load time.  This is a great way to take a technological bummer and turn it into reason to celebrate.

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