This may be relevant: "Don’t mark it as private or disallow embedding on YouTube, or we won’t be able to see it. Please note that because of how our system is built, YouTube’s view count will not increase even though we do watch your video." [1]
Also, YT view counts may not be as straightforward as you imagine, as they are a hot metric for advertisers.
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).
1: https://www.alliedpixel.com/2019/09/do-embedded-youtube-vide...
2: https://boostlikes.com/blog/2014/08/youtube-video-views-embe...
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).
Thanks for the suggestion.
I guess I didn't! :)
That's interesting because I looked around to see if that was possible and did not find it to be so. I wonder if they have some back door access to YT videos due to, well, being YC?
Interesting.