Why we count plays, not “views.”
Somewhere in every video platform is a team whose entire job is deciding what counts as a view. It sounds trivial. It is not.
A “view” on a mature platform is the output of an adversarial system: intent thresholds (did someone watch at least ~30 seconds?), repeat caps (the same person refreshing shouldn't count forever), and spam scrubbing that can revise counts downward days later. That machinery exists because money and status ride on the number, so people attack it.
What we can honestly build
Playback is a reference build. We don't have an ad market, a fraud team, or a global counting pipeline — so we don't pretend to. Our counter is deliberately modest and deliberately labeled:
- A play is counted after intentional playback (≈30s, or 40% of a short clip).
- We session-dedupe and cap repeats at ~5 per person per day.
- We call the number plays, not audited views — because that's what it is.
The same logic runs through Studio
Studio shows plays, watch-seconds, impressions and an estimated CTR. All of it is derived from an append-only beacon, and all of it is framed against your typical rather than presented as absolute truth. When we can't audit something, we say so on the surface where you'd read it.