YouTube isn’t just a place for videos, it’s a place for meaningful human interaction. Whether it’s views, likes or comments, these interactions both represent and inform how creators connect with their audience. That’s why we take the accuracy of these interactions very seriously. When someone tries to beat the system by artificially inflating view counts, they’re not just misleading fans about the popularity of a video, they’re undermining one of YouTube’s most important and unique qualities.
As part of our long-standing effort to keep YouTube authentic and full of meaningful interactions, we have started to periodically audit the views that a video has received. Whilst in the past, we would scan views for spam immediately after they occurred, starting today we will periodically validate the video’s view count, removing fraudulent views as new evidence comes to light. We don’t expect this approach to affect more than a minuscule fraction of videos on YouTube, but we believe that it’s crucial to improving the accuracy of view counts and maintaining the trust of our fans and creators.

As YouTube creators, we ask you to be extra careful when working with third-party marketing firms; unfortunately some of them will sell you fake views. If you need help promoting your video, please review our posts about working with third-party view service providers and increasing YouTube views.