What is measured, where the figures come from, and why YouTube's or Facebook's own dashboard may show a different number than ours.
The figures on the analytics screen come from the networks themselves; we sample them and store them. Understanding how that sampling works explains almost every gap against a network's own dashboard.
On the analytics screen, over a window of one week, two weeks, a month or three months:
During a live broadcast two separate figures are shown: viewers, meaning how many people are watching right now, and views, which is a running total. Both also appear per destination.
A finished broadcast's card shows its length, total views and peak.
YouTube supplies the concurrent viewer count and the video's view counter. Facebook supplies both, in two separate requests; when the view counter is not returned, the live view count is recorded in its place — a genuine floor rather than a guess.
Other networks do not report. Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Kick and custom RTMP destinations contribute zero to the figure. If you streamed to five destinations and only two of them were YouTube and Facebook, the number you see describes those two. That is not a fault; there is simply no interface returning the data.
Viewers on our own player are counted separately for the player's own limit and are not added into the total.
We ask the networks every ten seconds and keep the highest value we saw. Two consequences follow:
The figures reset each time you go on air, so they describe the current session rather than the whole history of that video on the network.
Each of these is real, and they stack:
The per-channel breakdown in the chart is likewise an even division of a broadcast's views across its destinations rather than separate per-network data. It is there to give a sense of scale.
There is no watch time, no drop-off points, and no view counter on a stored recording. The figures on a past broadcast's card belong to the live broadcast that happened, not to plays of the saved file.
Monthly stream hours appear on the billing screen alongside storage and translation minutes, against your plan's allowance.
A broadcast's own figures — peak, total views and length — are kept and are not deleted with age. The broadcast identifiers YouTube supplied, and chat text, are erased after thirty days under YouTube's developer policy. So the history you see stays, even once what sat behind it has been cleared.
Because our counting stops when the broadcast ends and YouTube keeps counting views of the recording. The gap widens the longer ago the broadcast was.
Those networks return no viewer data to us. The figure describes YouTube and Facebook only; for the rest you need the network's own dashboard.
Viewers is how many people are watching at this moment. Views is the network's running total. Peak viewers is the highest concurrent number we sampled.
No. There is no view counter for stored files. The views shown on a broadcast card are the live broadcast's, as reported by the networks.