I'm confused.

> Google has never announced how they count views. They have announced that recommended videos are suggested based on the % of videos watched. I would think some of that same technology is being used in the view count.

What do you mean? Surely there is no magical technology or algorithms behind view count? "If a unique user watches a video increment the counter by 1" why would they need anything more complex than this?

I know there is a lot of abuse protection but I'm not sure how this fits in with my assertion that 1 click = 1 view. There was a bug a few months back with Youtube that didn't apply anti-abuse checking to Mobile views (viewing a video from a mobile device) and a group of blackhat people abused this and sold views: they would view a video 1,000,000 times as if it was being viewed from a mobile device and Youtube would count 1,000,000 views, even if it was all from the same IP.

I'm not sure how it's debatable that if 800 people click on a Youtube video link then 800 views will be counted, what reason would they have for not counting 800 views if 800 people clicked on it?

The abuse protection algo works something like:

Total data transferred to unique IPs / size of the video.

Because the logs are all over the place (CDNs), it takes about 1 day for the view count to be updated.

This is a more accurate and abuse proof way of counting "views". Your simple "1 click = 1 view" is abuse prone, which is why it is not done this way.

> Total data transferred to unique IPs / size of the video

can you expand on this? Do you mean that if the video is 1MB and 200 UNIQUE IPs download 500kb each it will count as 100 views?

Right.

There is a difference between a page view and a video video view. The video views really should not increment unless someone watches them all the way through (or at least most of the way through). Since Google has not announced how they tally the view count I was just pointing out evidence that they are probably considering % of videos watched in the view count.

> The video views really should not increment unless someone watches them all the way through

Although this would be better it's not what they do. I'm a Youtube Partner and from the analytics I have access to I can see that no matter how long a user watches for a view is counted, otherwise they would not be able to provide "user retention" statistics.

"Absolute audience retention helps you see how often each moment of your video is being watched as a percentage of total views. Rewinding and rewatching can result in values of higher than 100%"

http://i.imgur.com/r6Wr0.jpg