Validated views

Every view is provisional until YouTube's systems have looked at it. The platform screens for bots and other artificial traffic, and only counts what survives. Studio's realtime card usually runs ahead of the public number because of that lag, and a total can move down after a spike if a batch gets thrown out.

The old habit of a count sticking at 301 came from this verification step. That specific behaviour was retired years ago, but the checks underneath it never went away. A frozen or corrected number is normally the system doing its job, so buying views to unstick it makes the problem worse.