YouTube: "Views" vs. "Impressions"

YouTube engagement metrics, such as views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions, reflect how many times a video or channel has been interacted with. These metrics can be an essential measure of your video or channel's overall popularity, thus determining how successful an ad campaign is.

Google strives to ensure that your metrics are high quality and come from actual humans and not computer programs. It takes their systems some time to figure out which views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions are legitimate, so there may be delays in reporting accurate information.

Video Views - Not Applied to All Videos

If your video is used as an ad on YouTube, Google will, in some cases, count views of your ad as views on your video. These paid advertising views are counted as views because they indicate that a viewer interacted with the video. For an "impression" to count as a "view," the ad must be a skippable video and meet the below requirements.

(Note: An "impression" is counted every time the ad is served.)

Paid advertising views will be counted as views when:

• • Someone watches a complete ad that's 11–30 seconds long.
  • Someone watches at least 30 seconds of an ad that's more than 30 seconds long.
  • Someone interacts with the ad.

If the ad does not meet the above requirements or is non-skippable, the paid advertising views will not be counted.

Additionally, the videos must be publicly on the YouTube channel hosting the video. If the video view settings are "hidden" or "private," the paid advertising views will not be counted.