Does watching videos on Piped contribute to watch time / view statistics on YouTube?
I know that my impact alone is close to zero when it comes to these statistics and since it is just a frontend I'd imagine it will but I'd like to be sure.
It is often claimed that these statistics - as well as leaving a comment and pressing like - contribute to a video being pushed by the algorithm but I guess no one except the YT devs knows for sure (and sometimes I'm not sure if they know either).
We did an experiment in an earlier thread here, I had an unmonetized test video on youtube and we used that to get some stats over one day.
This is my report:
https://lemmy.zip/comment/5089778
Now, since I have zero monetized videos on my account, I am probably missing some stats, but this is what I found, others in the thread did show some monetization stats if that is what you are looking for.
Oh thanks, I searched if someone had already asked this but I forgot about newpipe & freetube and only searched for piped.
Anyways, thank you so much for your answer and the detailed research you did! ^^
You are most welcome, it was a fun experiment, and I am glad to have been part of it.