Hey all, title pretty much says it all. How are YouTube views counted? Does the client have to "download" the video or is a single pageview enough to count as a view?

And also, how many times can a single IP view a video, counting as a view? Thanks.

Same ip can do the same video about 300 times...but when 300 is reached they check the ips that the views came from and if they notice that your video had views multiply times from the same ip they constantly freeze it till it gets more views from different ips.
Then its frozen condition is removed and you are able to have more views from all the users
Hope that helped

Downloading has nothing to do with it. Actually it's illegal to download anything from youtube which you haven't created/uploaded yourself.

As fas as I've seen the view count process is pretty complicated! For example channel views are counted the same as page-views are counted, however youtube video views are counted after a certain timer. For example if there is a 3 minute video, views longer than 15-20 seconds are counted. As far as I've seen views from a single IP are only counted once every 24/hours.