How to get 300k views from 150k viewers

[Smashing]

This is purely hypothetical, I doubt the distribution would ever be this perfect.

150,000 viewers watch a video once
75,000 of those viewers watch it again
37,500 watch it a third time
18,750 watch it a fourth time
9375...5th
4688...6th
2344...7th
1172...8th
586...9th
293...10th
146...11th
73...12th
37...13th
18...14th
9...15th
5...16th
2...17th
1...18th
1 person watches it 19 times for a total of 300,000 views.

I nearly flunked statistics, but I can add.

Barring cheating, view count is a measure of how popular a video is versus other YouTube videos, but shouldn't be compared to TV ratings. Basically I'm just saying views don't equal viewERs, but we knew that already. I do wonder what the real distribution would look like and how many viewers there really are for different videos.

Another way the view count is different from viewers is if more than one person is watching the same computer screen. For example there's 2 people in the room, but YT only counts 1 view. From my personal experience people tend to gather around a TV a hell of a lot more than they gather around a computer, so I wouldn't guess that would change the stats significantly.

[stantheman]

Do partial views count on YT's tally? I bail out of most videos well before the half-way mark as I'm sure the majority of us do. In fact, it takes a lot to hold my interest beyond 10 seconds with all the dross out there to sift through. I would guess that many of the supposedly most-viewed videos are also the least-viewed all the way through. But then again, I do suffer from ADD and can never finish what I

[Smashing]

haha.
yes, partials count. It just counts hits. I often click on a video, then click "view all comments" or another link, then hit the back button, and it reloads the video, instantly giving it two "views" for the price of one. It could be a video I don't even like enough to watch once all the way through, but sometimes I'm curious to see what the comments are besides five chain letters, three spams, and two "u r ghey"s.