• rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio
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    3 days ago

    If you want a view to count you need to use an official client

    I would think that parsing the website would count the same as any browser-based page load, since parsing the website requires first fetching the page (probably using something like wget or curl under the hood). I dunno if non-logged-in page loads are generally counted toward the overall view count on a given video, though.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      3 days ago

      Page loads don’t count as a view though, because otherwise things like search engine indexing would count as a view. It’s only considered a view if the video is watched for at least 30 seconds.

      • shrugal@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Search engines are easy to detect and filter out though, they have very distinct UA strings.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          6 hours ago

          That was just an example. There’s all sorts of automated traffic that shouldn’t count as a view. A human loading the page but not actually playing the video (like if they disable auto playing of videos) shouldn’t count as a view either.

    • normalexit@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      They parse the website for feeds, search, etc. It is a java library and it looks like they are using jsoup to parse the dom.

      Using the website and actually establishing a connection to a video are separate things. The search side of things is essentially a headless browser that is just aimlessly looking for videos. As far as YouTube is concerned nothing is played during this process.

      When you decide to commit and watch a video, the NewPipe client establishes a connection to the video stream, which doesn’t count for YouTube stats.

      YouTube counts a view for long-form content when a viewer watches for at least 30 seconds, while Shorts views count each time a short begins to play or replay, with no minimum watchtime. Valid views must come from human users, with limitations on how often the same person can generate views within a short timeframe to prevent fraud from bots or artificial inflation.