[oneearedrabbit]

This may be relevant: "Don’t mark it as private or disallow embedding on YouTube, or we won’t be able to see it. Please note that because of how our system is built, YouTube’s view count will not increase even though we do watch your video." [1]

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/video/

[tpetry]

How can they watch a video without its view count increasing? I am really interested.

[the-dude]

Does anybody know if youtube-dl increases a video's view count?

[m00dy]

why not ? :)

[detaro]

Because Youtube uses some measure of actually played video time to count a view. Depending on how it is implemented, downloads likly do not trigger that (since data loaded doesn't mean it was watched)

[nefitty]

Hm, seems like that would leave a mechanism open for blocking those kinds of sites. One reason I can think not to is if other apps, like YT for Roku, have to access the data directly and then process the relevant view count/ad stuff client side

[the-dude]

I guess the video count is updated by the player and youtube-dl does not use this player.

Also, YT view counts may not be as straightforward as you imagine, as they are a hot metric for advertisers.

[jaysh]

It's worth noting that YouTube is optimising for the opposite: they want to prevent artificial view count inflation. Therefore, this behaviour (the view count not increasing when the videos are automatically accessed) would make sense.

If you're interested, an interesting measure for difficulty is how much companies charge to "buy youtube views" (e.g, $16 per 1000 views is ~8x the cost you'd pay for typical CAPTCHA solving).

[duskwuff]

Given that they also mention needing embedding to be enabled, I suspect they're using an inline player on another site. IIRC, only plays on youtube.com are counted towards video view counts.

[gnicholas]

> IIRC, only plays on youtube.com are counted towards video view counts.

This appears to be untrue. [1, 2] It seems that embed views count, except possibly where autoplay is enabled (presumably because the video might be shown when no one is watching).

1: https://www.alliedpixel.com/2019/09/do-embedded-youtube-vide...

2: https://boostlikes.com/blog/2014/08/youtube-video-views-embe...

[Google234]

Why would you write something wrong like this in such an authoritative? Wouldn’t it be better to do 5 seconds of research instead of spreading fake news?

[martin_e]

I don't think there's a way to watch a video on YT without the count being incremented. Actually, the only way is if you watch your own videos with some frequency (not defined anywhere I could find).

[martin_e]

I checked, they are both unlisted and embedding is enabled.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[cjbprime]

Did you read the second sentence, though? It seems like it applies here.

[Google234]

Is that actually technically possible? I don’t think so

[Asuchug4]

Why not? YT view counter is famous for being stuck on some low value like "300" when thousands of people are watching. It just isn't something worth updating in real time.

[Google234]

That’s a thing from like 2015 that was in place to to make sure that the views were real. I’ve uploaded videos that have gotten 10s if views. Really, how hard do you think it is to make a counter?

[martin_e]

> Did you read the second sentence, though? It seems like it applies here

I guess I didn't! :)

That's interesting because I looked around to see if that was possible and did not find it to be so. I wonder if they have some back door access to YT videos due to, well, being YC?

Interesting.

[banachtarski]

.. more likely, the youtube view counting algorithm doesn't include embedded views.

[gnicholas]

In general, it does. https://boostlikes.com/blog/2014/08/youtube-video-views-embe...