I've been experimenting with the embedded version of the YouTube player and the YouTube API to make custom graphic statistics on how users have interacted with the video and how well the video has performed on different blogs etc. Using onStateChange-events primarily to be able to tell when a user watched the video from start to finish.
A few months ago my stats on how many users had watched a whole video correlated rather well with the ones in YouTube Analytics and the main counter. Naturally there were some discrepancies(5-10%), but since December I've seen extreme discrepancies to the YouTube counter(40-70%).
I know for a fact that people have actually watched the videos from start to finish due to the callbacks from the YouTube API but they are not showing up in the YouTube stats, making my stats completely irrelevant to anyone interested in using them.
So the actual question - does any of you know or have experienced that YouTube have changed how views get accounted for when using the embedded version of the YT player?
I know that they don't get accounted for if you use autoplay=1, if they skip forward in the video to trigger the events, watch the video multiple times etc. But all of these things were still the same a few months ago and my stats were completely different to what they are now.
Any input or feedback on using the embedded YT player would be much appreciated, as I am literally scratching my head here.
Thanks!