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)
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
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).
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.
> 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).
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?
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).