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August 13

Are youtube video views unique (one view per account IP) or they arent unique?

I saw some very underground bands music videos that have more views that it should (and was not "randomly" recommended to people by youtube or the comments would talk about it). So I have that question are those views because of people watching it multiple times (to listen to the thing multiple times) or each view is a unique user/ip view?2804:7F2:594:4C46:8141:C7F:EE11:3279 (talk) 16:33, 13 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I believe they're supposed to identify individual humans. The way YouTube comes up with this number is proprietary and they don't tell you the exact details. One aspect you didn't consider is just basing things off IP address would undercount views, as it's quite common for multiple people to share an IP address using NAT. So, for instance, if multiple views occur from the same IP address but logged into different Google accounts, I believe those are counted as separate views, though there's some secret sauce applied to try to weed out automated "bot" views. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 05:11, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]