The confusion between the two terms “views” and “viewers” might appear due to the misunderstanding of the following terms:
Views – Number of times the video (or channel) has been played (viewed) by unique viewers. Technically speaking, the Views are actually session ids and are incremented once a new session is started. The browser keeps the same session id while the user tries to refresh the page so if you are trying to increment that number by refreshing this is useless. Once you clear the session information from the browser you will be able to increment the number. Clearing sessions does not equal clearing cache or cookies.
Notes:
- A view is counted when someone watches a video (partially or full), but not in the preview mode. Video previews are not counted as views.
- The views are not counted for the owner of the video or the administrator of the platform watching the video in their account dashboard.
Viewer – the unique IP that accesses the requested page. In the dashboard statistics you can see the number of IPs (viewers) that accessed the video (or channel).