How does YouTube calculate the number of views for a video?

Question

I have made an internal movie site in .Net. I play the movie trailers using jw player. Now I want to know how to calculate the number of views for a video? Is it possible through code? PLease help.

NBL I dont have any database. I add the videos through an xml and the code reads the xml.

Answer 1

The database would have a table for videos, including a Hits column.

When you request the page from the server, the server would execute a stored procedure that adds +1 to the 'Hits' column.

Answer 2

Not sure exactly what you need.. but you can handle the play command (button or loading... however your videos are played), and attach that to a counter that you save in your database.

We would need a lot more (code set, video codec and such) before giving more.

Answer 3

You can also create a separate table with these columns :

• VideoId

• IP adress

And add a row each times an user watch a video...

Then you will calculate unique watch and not duplicate

(Instead of ip adress you can store userId if your users are registered)

Answer 4

A simple approach is to tally the number of pageloads for the page that contains the video, rather than the number of times the video itself is played. First, create a table in your database that contains these fields:

DateTime  date          // date of pageloads -- we'll get to this in a minute
int       videoID       // Unique Identifier for the video loaded
int       count         // Number of pageloads

When I tally pageloads, I do them by day so I can compile statistics over time. Of course, you can use a different granularity depending on your particular needs.

Additionally, I don't particularly like writing to the database with each pageload, so I have a class I've written that caches the hits, then writes them after every hundred hits or so.

In this class, I also retain each user's IP address. This allows me to ferret out duplicate pageloads. A subsequent task, which I'm working through in my own hitcounter, is to triage humans, legitimate spiders and unwelcome bots.

Answer 5

If you are embedding videos on your page, it's worth being aware of YouTube's policy on the question of autoplaying those videos, in relation to the official viewcount. If in the player you set autoplay = true, or equivalent, then the YouTube view count doesn't increase. This is to counter spammy viewcount auto-augmentation pages. The user has to click on the play button, and watch all, or at least most, of the video to count as a view.