Whether your brand is new to YouTube or a seasoned video marketing pro, you’ve probably heard about the importance of YouTube views. Views are the measure of how many times a viewer has watched your video, which is important because it determines your rank in search results and in YouTube’s “What to Watch Next” sidebar. But how do you know what counts as a view? And how do you increase your YouTube view count?

YouTube has specific guidelines for what constitutes a view, and the platform is very careful about how they tally them. This is because YouTube users have tried to deceive the site by artificially inflating their view counts in order to get their videos promoted or monetized. The platform has a few ways of determining if a view is legitimate:

Experts agree that a view counts when a video has been played by a human on one device. This is true regardless of if it has been watched once or repeatedly, and irrespective of whether the video was viewed via desktop or mobile, or whether it was embedded in another website (such as Facebook) or a video player within an app. Additionally, the view will only count if it is at least 30 seconds long.

Aside from this, YouTube will remove a view from the total if it looks like malware—software that is designed to damage a computer, server, or network. They also won’t count a view if it is a bot-initiated replay, or if it has been “reloaded” more than a few times. YouTube views