Watts Up With YouTube Views

Anthony Watts often pokes fun at campaigns, or any public messaging, about global warming. This time he did it with the video in which president Obama states he’s going to announce his climate plans:

AP: Obama says he’ll unveil climate plan in Tuesday speech ‘for the sake of our children’.
It seems though, that the world is making a collective yawn (consensus?) so far given the views. The video has been up for several hours and has only a few hundred views and has 437 “likes” as of this writing.

As someone who releases most of his science content on YouTube, let me explain something about how YouTube counts views. If you see a 301+ view count it means that you went above 300 views and now YouTube is going to verify if the views you’re getting are legit. This has as a consequence that the view count isn’t updated anymore in real-time and you will have to wait several hours before they update (this can take up to a day before it’s updated).