YouTube doesn’t make public their view counting algorithm so that it can’t be gamed, so it’s anyone’s guess.
Ohhhhh! So that’s why a lot of the comments to this post contradict each other. Well, that makes senses.
Yep. I have a few hunches about how it works (I would guess that the answer to your original question is “no” or “only kinda,” for instance) but honestly my hunches are likely no better than tea leaves and significantly less tasty.
It depends. Newpipe definitely does, because it’s a local client and uses your internet to watch the video. Invidious however can be configured to cache videos, which is useful on bigger instances where people watch the “top” videos. If a video is cached it will simply use the local video stream and not count a view.
So, it seems like not. Edit: But Actually, yes.I just tested this by finding some random video about cheese with a low number of views (827 as I write this).
I watched the WHOLE DAMN THING. TWICE. Kidding, I love cheese, it was lovely. Both times I watched it via Invidious instances. It was 827 before, still 827 right now.
Edit: OK, looking now, it’s up to 830. Dammit, have one of you all been watching my cheese video? I never watched it when I loaded it from YT direct. So there’s 1 extra view.
I’m pretty sure YouTube randomly “fuzzes” the public view count of videos specifically to prevent this kind of research.
You need to finish the study by proving it does change the views when you watch via youtube directly
Most likely. Even if you aren’t directly asking YouTube for the video, the other site does.
Honestly no idea. It would depend if the views are counted from an api request or from amount of clients asking for the video. Newpipe Invidious and many other 3rd party frontends dont use youtubes api cause they would quickly be blocked and sued.
I feel like that’s not how API’s work.
Yes.
