Why Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom was \”stuck\” at 301 views on YouTube

HBO decided to publish the entire first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s latest TV-series Newsroom to YouTube. When I visited that page on YouTube yesterday I saw that the views were only at 301 and the video had been on YouTube for a good portion of the day already. I thought: "Well, that was a flop."

But, then I saw this video by YouTube user numberfile explaining while most videos "freeze" at 301 views before continuing a day later. It turns out that YouTube’s analytics team does this on purpose to allow for "fake views" and the worldwide caching phenomenon to play out before they show an accurate count. YouTube considers views "a currency".

Interesting stuff.