
Just because someone sees your video, doesn’t mean it’ll count as a view! Turns out there are varying definitions of what counts as a ‘view’ on video content.
Depending on the website that’s hosting your video, TubeMogul informs us that a half view, and autoplay or a refresh can an affect on whether your view count goes up or stays as it is. Below is the table of results from TubeMogul’s research, updated in 2010 and found here via Creative Commons license. One/session is one count per session (monitored via the viewer’s IP address), > 1/2 view means the viewer got through more than half the video. Note that autoplays aren’t always counted, which is important if you want that intro video on your homepage to gather a nice collection of views. You’ll have to weigh up the importance of people seeing your video vs raising the view count.
III. Summary of Findings
Site | Full View | >1/2 View | Refresh | Embedded | Embedded Autoplay |
blip.tv | one/sess. | one/sess. | no count | one/sess. | one/sess. |
Dailymotion | count | count | count | count | count |
Metacafe | count | count | no count | count | count |
MySpace | count | count | count | count | count |
Viddler | count | count | count | count | count |
Vimeo | one/sess. | one/sess. | no count | count | count |
Yahoo! Video | count | count | count | count | count |
YouTube | count | count | count | count | no count |
By David Burch, Director of Communications – Link to Report