This article was published on August 5, 2015

YouTube is getting rid of its weird ‘301+’ view count


YouTube is getting rid of its weird ‘301+’ view count

Today, Google has made a lot of YouTube creators happy – it’s removing the “301+” static play count for new videos in favor of a more accurate figure.

Explained via a concise tweet, the video play count will now show the real-time number of views that the company is confident have come from real people, but won’t include plays by bots, which will still undergo a verification process.

Removing the irritating and frankly uninformative “301+” is a sign that the company is increasingly confident in its ability to distinguish between human views and those from automated systems. The 301+ count was used as a placeholder for popular new videos while YouTube went off to verify which views were authentic, and which were not.

For a company that sells ads as its main business, this distinction is critical.

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For viewers, it doesn’t really mean too much, but for creators, it means you won’t have to wait around to see how popular your most recent upload really is.

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