The simple explanation is that those were bot views. This was happening ten years ago, on both youtube and google blogs. Bots crawl the site to log information and create search references, and there are lots of them. They are not human, so they are deleted.
Interesting theory! There have been examples that make me think this is not the case. I uploaded a video on the troops "coming home" but it was super depressing so I didn't post it here or on PAW and it got 8 views in a week and I yanked it because it wasn't fun to watch anyways.
I saw it happen in real time on a blog that I was running years ago. I watched the analytics, and in the first few hours it was mostly bots from all over the workd, until I managed to start up traffic from other sites. The stats would then go down to the human traffic.
The simple explanation is that those were bot views. This was happening ten years ago, on both youtube and google blogs. Bots crawl the site to log information and create search references, and there are lots of them. They are not human, so they are deleted.
Also people who click but don't watch enough for interactions to stick.
Interesting theory! There have been examples that make me think this is not the case. I uploaded a video on the troops "coming home" but it was super depressing so I didn't post it here or on PAW and it got 8 views in a week and I yanked it because it wasn't fun to watch anyways.
I saw it happen in real time on a blog that I was running years ago. I watched the analytics, and in the first few hours it was mostly bots from all over the workd, until I managed to start up traffic from other sites. The stats would then go down to the human traffic.