Video views are a very public metric that tend to be the beginning of our journey of prejudice before consuming content.
At least on platforms where we see the view count before we hit play. We see that either a lot of people watched the video or it was a sad amount. There are other factors that the more data literate among us will look for like ratios of likes and comments, but end of the day views tell you how many people laid eyes upon your video.
Each platform also tracks views differently.
The way YouTube tracks views makes the view count a more honest reflection of the number of people watching than Facebook, which feels inflated.
Either way, we can all agree that a lot of views is a good thing, but what does that actually tell you?
What does a view even mean?
On my classic video Busta Rhymes - Extinction Level Event 2: The Wrath Of God Album Review I was given a blessing by the algorithm.
For a brief period I was gifted with 8400 views out of nowhere. After that gift Google saw my watch time of approximately 1 minute, and said, “No one cares about this video”. It was published Oct 31, 2020 and has only gained 400 views since.
While I did get 8000 views, and 10 subscribers, no one really watched the video. Outside of the 27.42$ of ad money I’ve made on it, those views did diddly squat for me. It’s just a vanity metric.
A view means someone opened your video, it does not mean someone watched your video.
Facebook and YouTube calculate views differently so they mean different things
The consensus I found online believes that Facebook (and Instagram) track a view after 3 seconds of run time.
That means someone can accidentally leave your video open while scrolling on Facebook and it tracks a view. On YouTube the threshold is 30 seconds. This means a YouTube view is instantly worth more than a Facebook view.
You can farm 10 times as many fake views on Facebook in an hour than you can on YouTube, it’s basic math.
Let’s pretend it was all legitimate, 30 seconds is a more intentioned action than 3 seconds.
In 30 seconds you can drop a whole intro, and say your name. The 3 seconds is just the hook, did you catch them? If so you get the view. If not, so sad.
What really matters is views, combined with the other metrics that surround them.
Ratios of views to watch time or views to engagement metrics are what matters
Nominal metrics in social media land are often superficial.
It’s a fact that 8000 people clicked on my video. It’s also a fact, as proven by the watch time and lack of comments, that 8000 people did not watch my video. I’ll be lucky if out of that 8000 people, 20 of them reached the end of the podcast.
When you see people getting excited for view counts going up, just keep in mind, that’s not a reflection of people watching. Total number of comments doesn’t mean anything either, sometimes 85% of the comments will come from two people. You need to look at everything, the number of people who actually engaged, and compare that with the number of views.
Then you need to compare that against similar content.
At that point you can start to create a benchmark that gives you a sense for whether or not a post’s performance is good.
It could just be nothing with a high view count.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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