If your TikTok video isn’t performing as well as you might have hoped, you may find yourself wondering if there’s any way to boost your views.
Or, perhaps you’re looking at your profile and you’re wondering how many views actually came from other people than yourself.
Either way, you may be wondering – does TikTok count your own views? In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know!
Does TikTok Count Your Own Views?
No, TikTok does not count your own views, at least not repeatedly. Regardless of how many times you view your own TikTok video, it will still only show as one view on the total view counter.
This is much different than if someone else were to view your videos. If another person were to view your videos multiple times, it would count as multiple views and the view counter would keep increasing.
In fact, it’s possible for one person to add hundreds or even thousands of views to the view counter if they’re determined enough!
However, you cannot do this yourself – at least not from the same account that you posted the video on.
Using An Alt Account To Boost Views
TikTok allows you to have multiple accounts. So, some people have wondered – could you use an alternate account to artificially boost your videos’ views?
Actually, this is a possibility. As long as you are logged into one of your other accounts, you can watch your videos as many times as you wish, and each one will add to the total view counter.
However, letting the video play endlessly won’t work. Based on our testing, it only counts as a view when you exit out of the video, and then tap on it again to open it back up.
If you do this quickly, it can add up to a lot of views rather quickly – making it appear as if many people have watched your video.
Note however that doing something like this may go against TikTok’s community guidelines.
Because TikTok wants to keep a fair platform for all creators, they don’t want anyone to do anything that can be seen as manipulating the algorithm, or manipulating a video’s performance.
This is why it’s against the rules to buy fake likes and fake followers, for example. These artificially boost your account and videos, and it’s unfair to everyone else on the platform.
While we haven’t heard of people getting banned for viewing their own videos repeatedly, it is still technically a risk. So, we wanted to mention it.
Of course, viewing your own video won’t necessarily help it get seen by more people anyway, so it may be a waste of time regardless.
Why Watching Your Own Videos A Ton Can Be Harmful
Although watching your own videos to increase your views will help you appear more popular to anyone that visits your profile, it doesn’t actually help you grow your account.
In fact, it may hurt you more than it helps you. Here’s why.
When you publish a TikTok video, TikTok collects a lot of information about how that video performs. They also take the performance of your past videos into account as well. All of this information helps TikTok decide how many people to show your video to.
If you watch your video a bunch on your own, there’s a lot of data TikTok expects, but doesn’t receive.
For example, let’s say you watched your video 100 times. You are only able to like it once. In a purely numbers sense, this means that for every 100 views, you only got 1 like. This can be interpreted negatively.
Likewise, you probably aren’t watching the video completely each time you viewed it. This brings down the average view duration, and percentage of the video that was viewed. Both of these are metrics that TikTok takes into account – if somebody only watches 2 seconds of your video before ending it, TikTok sees this as a bad sign.
Alternativley, TikTok may recognize this unnatural behavior and filter it out completely.
The point is, watching your own TikToks won’t help them get seen by more people – and there’s the chance that it can even hurt your video’s exposure.
Conclusion
Although TikTok only counts one of your views, it seems to count all views made by other accounts – including other alt accounts of your own.
However, artificially inflating your view count won’t help your videos perform better on the For You page.
I hope that you’ve found this article helpful. If you have any other questions about TikTok, please ask them using the comment form below.
Finally, if your video is stuck on 0 views, I highly recommend checking out this article.
Wishing you the best,
– James McAllister