A YouTube video has been stuck at 301 views for 11 years. Nevertheless, the video has been viewed millions of times. There is a security mechanism from Google behind it, as the owner of the video explains. The “bug” was only resolved in 2015.
Brady John Haran has a video on YouTube that has been accessed millions of times. This is evidenced not only by the comments but also by the nearly 4 million likes on the video. But why is the video stuck at 301 views?
Brady inquired with YouTube as to why the view count was stuck and why it was almost always 301. He received an official response from Google. Brady himself explains in the video that it supposedly reached more than 15.1 million views by January 2021. We have embedded the English video here for you.
At over 300 page views, YouTube activates a review of the video
What is behind the number? In fact, the number 301 corresponds to a security mechanism. For views under 300, videos were not relevant enough for YouTube, as they were not financially successful.
Videos that reached more than 300 views were reviewed by YouTube and were blocked at 301 views. This was also handled by the internal code of YouTube. And here, there were more or less only two options:
- If the views are 300 or less, add one for each view.
- If the views exceed 300, go for review
The number was simply a threshold set by Google and has hardly any other significant meaning. Since the review process took some time and the platform was already very popular in the 2010s, the videos of the most popular content creators were often blocked for this reason.
When did this “bug” disappear? Google resolved the bug or glitch in 2015. Since then, YouTube relies on a different system. It is, however, not a coincidence that Brady’s video is still “stuck” at 301 views today. For YouTube has deliberately blocked the views of the video. In this way, a record of one of the systems is preserved, which confused most users of YouTube at that time.
