Friday, April 22, 2011

YouTube Video Embedding Diminishes View Count


Google's YouTube enables people to embedded videos on other websites. However, this feature reduces a video's viewer count, which is often used to gauge popularity. It appears embedding reduces the view count, leading some YouTube account holders to "disable embedding."

Google should improve this feature. Internet advertising companies, such as Google's Adsense, use software to track each time an ad is shown and clicked on publisher's websites. YouTube should adopt such a feature for embedding, to keep track of how often a video is shown on another site.