A large portion of YouTube videos are watched on other sites in embeddable players (like the one below of Erepublik CEO Alexis Bonte giving us an Elevator Pitch). But if someone watches a YouTube video on a site other than YouTube, does it count towards the total views of that video? Apparently not, or at least not always.
One TechCrunch reader had a video of his picked up by a popular site, where it generated 15,000 views, but the YouTube view counter for that video only went up by about 1,000 views. Perplexed, he sent YouTube an email, and received the following response (bold added for emphasis):
“Hi there,
Thanks for your email. I would like you to know, if a user views the video
on the external website itself, it is not added to the view count of the
video on YouTube. However, if a user is directed to the YouTube site on
clicking the embedded video on the external website, it would register as
an additional count to the video views.Additionally, changes to video and account information on our site such as
video view count can take a few hours to update and synchronize. We’re
constantly working to make that happen a lot faster and appreciate your
patience.Regards,
Shweta
The YouTube Team”
This is just from a support rep who may be mistaken about YouTube’s policy on counting views (we have an email in to YouTube asking for clarification), but her response does suggest that at least some views from other sites do not count. One reason for this might be that some external sites put YouTube videos on autoplay whenever the page they are on loads. That can game the whole YouTube popularity system, so YouTube does not count autoplays, as NewTeevee recently found out. And indeed, our reader’s video was on a site that autoplayed his video. (For more on how the various video sites count views, see this TubeMogul report).
Mystery solved, right? Well, not exactly. We use YouTube for all the videos on Elevator Pitches, and we don’t set those to autoplay. Viewers have to click on them to watch.
Yesterday, we hit play repeatedly on a bunch of videos on Elevator Pitches, and then went over to their YouTube to see if any of the views registered. Nada. Then we started watching the videos on YouTube itself. Still nada. Maybe it’s the time delay, though. We really can’t tell. Because the views do change a few hours later, there is just no way of knowing if it was from us or someone else.
So as a final test, I’ve embedded an Elevator Pitch below from the CEO of Erepublik, a massive online social strategy game. At the time of this post the video has been viewed only 490 times. We’ll see if we can move that number up at all from here.
Update: We’ve received word from a YouTube spokesperson who told us:
Viewcounts are important to the community and are a reflection of the interests and intents of video viewers. Autoplaybacks are not counted toward the visible “views” numbers displayed on the YouTube site because autoplaybacks are not viewer initiated. The majority of videos are not affected by this.
Update 2: The view count for the video below is up to 1,786 views by Saturday morning. Most of those are presumably from this post, and took a while to register. So maybe Google does know how to count but it can only count very slowly.
Since Google can’t even seem to count ad unit impressions correctly on their publisher sites, I’m not overly surprised to see they can’t count the views correctly either.
LoL . you are right .
Totally Correct ! This is Google … Huh ?
Shh, don’t tell Viacom
LOL
They are trying to save some money. With the Viacom fiasco lurking,they don’t want to add more views to possible copyright material (and then have to end up paying more money for it)
Well i was always under the impression that viewing the video on the youtube domain will account to the views. Also not many people i have come across with realize that after playing an embeded youtube click on an external, a second click ont he video will direct you to the youtube source. I usually do this to be able to rate and favorite a clip.
Perhaps they add the views to a queue and then they update the db every so often to prevent writes.
yep.
I wish you guys used Vimeo instead of YouTube. Much nicer player and higher quality videos.
I’ve been uploading videos to YouTube since 2006, and have done an analysis on how YouTube counts views. Here is what I know:
#1 Clicks on embedded videos on external sites DO get counted, except autoplays, which NewTeeVee has found (news to me, although I personally have never set the embedded videos to autoplay).
#2 When you click on a video, play it once, then click on “replay” button to play it more than once, those “replays” DO NOT get counted. This applies to both videos on YouTube and on external sites. (This ought to explain why when you did the test and hit the play button repeatedly and the view count does not advance).
#3 View counts on videos that are popular (with thousands of views) are not instant, instead, they get refreshed after a few hours.
Before viewing the embedded video, 490 views. After viewing the embedded video, 490 views.
That’s because TechCrunch readers from all over the world are hitting the play button, resulting in a pause in view count. Come back after several hours, the view count will advance.
Youtube power user is correct. I would just add one thing to the autoplay issue. Youtube USED to count those, it was only in the last couple of weeks where they turned it off. A Youtube engineer has acknowledged this is a bug in their support forum and is seeking further details from other video producers
http://groups.google.com/group.....e5ac6f8153
At my company we use the autoplay feature extensively on microsites where the entire point of the page is simply to watch the video. Forcing people to click again (or in internet explorer, to click yet again) is stupid. Youtube can deal with view spam abuse simply by looking to see if the page auto-refreshes along with auto-playing. That’s clearly an evil attempt to game the system.
Uh, you’re just figuring this out *now*? Way to stay on top of technology.
The view count is updated only a few times a day, you won’t see it counting real-time
Should have found a video with 480 views
I have also noticed this. The counter will stop for a period of time, then suddenly the number will jump by a couple hundred. So, you can’t play a video, then expect it to immediately count.
So they cache the video pages. This counts as news of some sort nowadays?
Still at 490
I would love to hear some thoughts/commentary about the significance of this. Where is the story here? Are there implications? (Not trying to be standoffish - genuinely curious to hear the TC take). Is google lying? Does this impact advertising? The Viacom lawsuit? A personal brand tracking? Etc.
There needs to be a standard way to count views across all video sites.
Frank, tell me about it. The “reporting” issue is the single biggest annoyance I have to deal with in this industry.
A bigger story would involve looking into view fraud on YouTube. As a case study, take the Avril Lavigne video that currently holds the most views ever on the site. The video was publicly pushed to the top by users running refreshes in the browser. Not only does this call into question YouTube’s ranking system, but as Lavigne is part of their partner program, millions of ad impressions have been served without any real audience. I imagine this type of fraud runs rampant on YouTube, and advertisers are losing a lot of money by serving their ads on the site.
anon - embedded youtube videos do not generate any ad impressions. so while a video may have millions and millions of views, only views on Youtube where an ad is displayed is generating revenue. this is not fraud.
Based on what I saw about a month ago, the player was not embedded as a .swf, but rather the entire page was loaded in an iFrame. The parent page refreshed the iFrame at a given interval. This caused an impression to load each time, and would constitute fraud if the ads were CPM based and each refresh was counted by Google as an impression. I’m sure Google has some sort of CPM fraud detection in place, but Google and other ad servers are not really transparent regarding this issue.
Serious question: do you guys email them from an @techcrunch.com address or just a regular email address?
I figure that any tech company worth its salt should have redirects or policies set up so that anything that comes from you guys immediately goes to a higher-up’s inbox.
wow really? as Youtube Power User mentioned and is common knowledge to anyone that uses youtube regularly, view counts are not in real time.
embedded views do count and you can see the top 5 externally linked sites under the statistics and data tab (on youtube). youtube is also tracking all these externally linked videos under their Insight analytics.
nice job techcrunch!
I agree with you. There are few services that keep the numbers in realtime. But for Youtube or Imeem and many other services, this feature is updated after a period of time.
It is normal, and this stuff means that you don’t have additional server requests and in this case your site is working better.
This is not quite a “latest news” item, Eric
CrunchBase Information
[Company name]
Information provided by CrunchBase
I think we get the idea that the info comes from cbase. Pick one.
“Yesterday, we hit play repeatedly on a bunch of videos on Elevator Pitches…”
IP address. 1 person viewing the same thing over and over… probably counts only once. Try viewing from different sources to play with this… i.e. web enabled phones, home, work, starbucks, etc. on a view that you create, don’t tell anyone about, that is not posted from a TC IP. What happens then?
Sorry… meant… create a new video… but keep it secret until you are ready to talk about it. I.E. something boring and not likely to get much/if any hits but hits from you. I.E. “live video of my mouse pad being used”… w/e.
yea .. thats web development.. Somethings can be confusing. If the video is iframed or somth then it should go thru youtubes server as if you visited the page. But if video was cached or downloaded into external site then counts would not go up. Just thoughts. but then again i dont code youtubes nor anything at all:)
Erick, you should think about switching to Vimeo. We are using Vimeo for our site and it rocks in terms of player interface. They drive a lot of traffic to our site and there are more opinion leaders (niche community) than youtube. They count views for an embedded video.
you should probably have some sense to strike the name in the reply.
Nice job the comment features! looks great
Maybe Google doesn’t know how to count youtube videos, but they definitely know how to count their piece of my monthly AdSense money.
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
Am i the only person that is waving the pom poms for microsoft in this arena? F**k google, they are using their enormous global reach to piss on every niche in the internet. I used to wish them well but now i dont. Im quite happy that most new initiatives of theirs are failing, and as much as i admire a company that genuinely is trying to have a go at being all things to all people (online), it is very pleasing to see them fail. It will be their undoing also.
yeah f**k Google since it’s a major Internet player, Microsoft since it the major software vendor, Yahoo and Apple will be next… IBM is the big bad blue..
Windows permitted the development of hundreds of thousand of companies and a globally shared interface
Google permitted to reach billions of webpages and to start hundreds of thousands of online companies
it’s rarely the best solution for a long time, but it is what allows a continuous development of companies, products and services.
There are still webpages that don’t display properly in Safari or Firefox, what if we had hundreds of browsers?
A single company domination in a specific market for a certain period of time definitely kills hundreds of other companies, some with better products, but allows the development of hundreds of thousands of them.
See it in the long term…
Also, I am sorry but I don’t get the point of the article, you have discovered that YouTube doesn’t count clicks from embedded videos and you’re saying Google doesn’t know how to count? Ok, it’s your opinion and I respect it.
But what’s your point? What are the consequences?
By the way, if embedded videos were counted, you could easily duplicate the pages and have them reload all day.. this would ruin all the ranking systems having a huge impact on their advertisement credibility. (as for Avril videos as mentioned by Anon). So not counting them is giving YouTube more control over the rankings and better credibility.
Gravatar? That’s a pipe dream, We already have OpenID and Passport
Lloyd you are not alone, Michael and everybody else who knows what’s going on is on board with MS.
Hope they learn to count soon before Adsense too fails to register the hits it gets.
To show users any view count is fine. But what count they show to the court??
One of the biggest abusers of the Auto-play view count feature was this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpAI8TzQDes
which was at one point was placed on the IMVU homepage on Auto-play in a small box in the corner - and it is a silent video - meaning every single time an IMVU user came to login - they racked up a view and soon it had over 70 million. Must have had some stanford students advising them or something….
You can’t honestly believe that by hitting play, the video gets a hit count?
You have to watch over half of it to be considered a view and
that was 1 year ago, they may have change the way they count views now.
I think the way they hide the links to the top referrers is lame (they send no traffic - even on very popular videos). IMO YouTube/Google should give something back to the people promoting their videos and show the top referrers in full-view. I believe this could work in Youtube’s favour. Even more poeple would want to promote YouTube videos.
Also they use nofollow on the links to the sites that send them traffic. Not getting traffic from the links wouldn’t be too bad if you were getting a proper link that could help with SEO.
Give something back YouTube!
YouTube knows how to count with a twist which doesn’t make any sense. If you want to see the correct number of views you have to be logged in and check the views from My Account / My Videos. The views are always updated there but the updates take a while to appear under the player. Caching or something?
Of course! Google does know how to count. But they count very slow…like if you’re watching a video clip right now, your view will be counted next week or next, next week. The hell…
test
Of course, the view count don’t get updated real time. Is this a news on Techcrunch? And I thought it was a tech blog.