ANSWER FOR WHY 301 VIEWS
For the first 300 views (sometimes it'll stop at around 350),
"all is fair" -- meaning it does not matter how those "views"
were generated, cheating or otherwise. They're permanent.
After that, YouTube checks up on those views to see how
many were actually "legitimate". If YouTube feels that any
of them were suspicious, they will actually freeze the view
count until the number of "real views" hits that 300 mark --
or in extreme cases, they will behind-the-scenes reset the
counter and wait until the video gets 300 "real views".
What exactly is a "real view"? For the YouTube "AdSense"
program, CTRs (Click-through Ratios) are only considered
after 30 seconds of a video. Thus, in order for real views to
take effect and count, a video has to be played at least 30
seconds -- or the entire length of a video if it's shorter than
that.
Why are videos stuck at 300, 301, or 307? YouTube won't
ever tell you (or anyone) this, but most ordinary videos get
1 "rating" for about every 200 to 300 views, while the extra
popular videos get 1 rating for about every 50 or 100. Thus
anything which "deviates" from those norms is considered
suspicious. (I'm pretty sure that YouTube probably has an
equivalent formula for "comments", but I do not know what
those minimums/maximums might be).
Also taken into consideration would be: 1 -- the number of
different computers that have watched your video, 2 -- how
many of those views were actually derived from the "same"
computers, and 3 -- the "pace" at which people clicked on
your video. If you have friends who legitimately watch your
video, but do it repeatedly maybe every few minutes/hours,
I believe that only some of those views count, and that the
others are set aside.
YouTube (and Google) have statistics for everything, more
than we'll ever know. Thus, I'm sure there are other factors
too -- like the "proportionality" of those views compared to
your previous video(s). In other words, if before all this you
were only getting 5 views a day, how can it be that all of a
sudden you're getting 300 if your total subscribers has not
gone up significantly?
All this helps to explain why your views are "stuck" at 301
while the person who uploaded Susan Boyle and "Britain's
Got Talent" had over 20,000,000 after just a couple weeks:
-- those numbers were not derived from "bots",
-- people watched for more than 30+ seconds,
-- the ratings are not "disproportionate" at all,
-- tons of computers have watched this video,
-- nobody re-clicked after only a few seconds,
-- there's no way that Susan Boyle had that many "friends"
on YouTube before she became famous, all of them trying
to inflate the views of an unknown person's video.
