YouTube engagement metrics (views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions) reflect how many times your YouTube video or channel has been interacted with. These metrics can be an important measure of your video or channel’s overall popularity.
We want to make sure that your metrics are high quality and come from actual humans and not computer programs. It takes our systems some time to figure out which views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions are legitimate.
Note: It may take time for your metrics to appear in our system during the first few hours your video is published.
Change in metrics
After legitimate engagement events are counted, your metric count should update more often. The timing of these changes varies depending on a video or channel's popularity and views. Keep in mind that we're constantly confirming and adjusting engagement events.
On some videos and channels, your metric count might seem frozen or not show the metrics that you expect. Metrics are algorithmically confirmed to maintain fair and positive experiences for content creators, advertisers, and viewers. To verify that metrics are accurate, YouTube may temporarily slow down, freeze, or change your metric count, and discard low-quality playbacks.
Note: Using several devices to watch the same video and streaming the same video across several windows and tabs are examples of low-quality playbacks.
Paid advertising views
If your video is used as an ad on YouTube, we may count views of your ad as views on your video. These paid advertising views are counted as views because they indicate that a viewer interacted with the video.
- Skippable in-stream ads: Paid advertising views will be counted as views when:
- Someone watches a complete ad that’s 11–30 seconds long
- Someone watches at least 30 seconds of an ad that’s more than 30 seconds long
- Someone interacts with the ad
- In-feed video ads: Paid advertising views will be counted as views when someone clicks the ad and the video starts to play
Check views with YouTube Analytics
If you're looking at a video you uploaded, you can monitor your views more closely using YouTube Analytics. Keep in mind that Realtime activity only shows estimates of potential view activity. It might not match the number you see on the watch page.