It’s YouTube’s 5 year birthday this week, so I decided to make a little “My YouTube Story” video for you about the first year.

I hope it gives you a little insight into some events that happened in the beginning.

Please thumb-up, comment and favorite over at YouTube :-)

That’s a pretty cool number!  Thank you so much!

Don’t forget to thumb-up, comment and fave over at YouTube to help the vid and let’s have fun working our way to 400 million :-)

Anyway, I will make a video shortly thanking you all!  But, with toxic black mold taking over my apartment, then zombies eating my head, followed by  me having to move out of my apartment (still headless?) to escape the mold.. and now a FULL MOON hitting tomorrow,  it will be a miracle if ever manage to make that video!!!

In the mean time, THANK YOU SO MUCH for making me reach that milestone!  You all ROCK, I love you!

Since I get asked this question EVERY SINGLE DAY “How can your views be less than your ratings?  Or comments?” Or, since I get accused of creating view-count-fraud, I thought it might be a good idea to tell you how the views are counted on YouTube and how the ratings and comments can get ahead of the views as well.  I might actually make a video about this in the near future as the confusion seems to happen most on YouTube itself.

So, here goes.

When a video is uploaded to YouTube, the view counter is pretty much real-time. The ratings counter is also real-time as well as the comment counter. But then ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE when the views hit around 308 views!

At around 308 views, the VIEW COUNTER STOPS COUNTING while the Ratings and Comments counters continue to tabulate.

The views counter WILL NOT UPDATE FOR ANOTHER 4 to 6 hours, while the ratings and comments continue to increase in real-time.

At this point, take a look at the comments on any video experiencing this and you will see “VIEW COUNT FRAUD!!!”   “RATINGS FRAUD!!!!”  ”FRAUD FRAUD FRAUD!!!!”

Those comments will be followed by others explaining that the views don’t update in real-time.. but right below those comments will be another stream of “VIEW COUNT FRAUD” comments.

So, what is going on here?

Well, I think the view-counting delay is caused by YouTube analyzing views to see what views are real and what views are fake.  The 308 view count number is a little higher than the 207 count number that the counter used to freeze at, but I think that YouTube actually starts analyzing views at 307 and they don’t publish an update until they have determined what views are legitimate and what views are fake.  This prevents people from taking over the most viewed pages with fake views.

As an example of fake views in the past, there was a guy who created a gossip channel last year. He took his videos and embedded them 200 times on his MySpace page with autoplay on and then hit reload repeatedly.  He managed to get to the most viewed page time and time again until YouTube shut him down for terms of use violations.  This delay in counting views is a direct result of these kinds of abuses of the system.

So, that’s what’s going on with the view counts being less than the ratings and comment counts. Don’t freak out if your views freeze for even as long as a whole day!  YouTube is not messing with you.. they are just analyzing your views before they publish an updated number.

If you have any additional questions about this or other things about YouTube, let me know in the comments below.

Look at who YouTube uses as an example of a successful partner on YouTube :-) Two people, myself and Panacea81!

Awesome!  Thanks jamesingtonthethird for the screenshot.

Thank you SOOO much for helping me hit 200 MILLION Video Views on YouTube!

Please rate and comment over at YouTube to help this video get even more views :-)

Thanks so much guys!!  I owe it all to all of you!!!

Looking forward to the next 200,000 :-)

Please rate and comment over at YouTube to help this video be seen.  Thanks! :-)

“The average visitor to YouTube is costing Google between one and two dollars, according to new research that  shows Google losing up to $1.65 million per day on the video site.

More than two years after Google acquired YouTube, income from premium offers and other revenue generators don’t offset YouTube’s expenses of content acquisition, bandwidth, and storage.

YouTube is expected to serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009, costing Google up to $2,064,054 a day, or $753 million annualized. Revenue projections for YouTube fall between $90 million and $240 million.

“Maybe this is in part because, as  Al writes,“Researchers from HP Palo Alto studied videos uploaded to YouTube and found that  popularity has little to do with quality or persistence.”

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This is why you will probably see changes happening to YouTube that we mentioned earlier. – Marina

I just noticed that I am now the 16th most viewed channel of all time on YouTube!

My 163 Million Total Video Views puts me among some pretty impressive company on YouTube, which is not bad considering I only started 2 years ago!

The list is here on YouTube.

This was cool… over the weekend, I had the #1 most viewed and the #2 most viewed videos, simultaneously, for the day :-)