this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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Using the API "correctly" is likely a requirement for the view to be counted. Their media extractor circumvents that by intentionally not using their API and instead parsing their website for content. Then it establishes a connection to the stream using an internal API.
If you want a view to count you need to use an official client (or at least one with a legit API key). It not counting is a feature with NewPipe.
(Google probably knows the content is being streamed, but if you could just create synthetic views with a third party project, that would be bad for YouTube stats)
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.
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.
Search engines are easy to detect and filter out though, they have very distinct UA strings.
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.
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.