If you are regularly creating video content on YouTube to help market your products, the view count is one thing that will capture your interest quickly. After all, with each video we put out, want it be shared and secretly hope it would go viral. It’s actually quite exciting to watch the numbers climb.

But have you noticed, when you get to about 300 views, the counter on YouTube seems to get stuck? Stranger than that, it almost always gets stuck at 301 or a little over that.

The good news is, the YouTube view counter is not broken. Truth is, Google built this in as a way to ensure true views are counted. When video views are below 300, they aren’t too concerned about view fraud but when you start getting more and more views, YouTube starts paying attention and freezes your counter until they can verify your views (programatically of course).

So that is the reason in a nutshell. But why 301?

That has something to do with programming – and a little math. I found a fantastic little video – on YouTube of course. That helps explain all this very clearly even if you aren’t the geeky type. Hey, I flunked math and even I understood it. They also talk about why the number 300. The video is longer than what I like but very informative if you are spending a lot of time and resources marketing via YouTube.