It's a 20 year streaming service, and it's Google. There's a certain expectation I have from that. The fact that it's just an endpoint being hit by the client is...baffling. I don't think it's in the realm of expected possibilities for most of us, being the most naive, and fragile, implementation possible.

The fact that ad revenue didn't change means they do have robust ad tracking, but the view numbers are +/- some unexpected level of fiction.

> The fact that ad revenue didn't change means they do have robust ad tracking

Ad tracking is usually done client-side too, so ad revenue being stable just means that the missing view counts are probably limited to the users who already weren't viewing ads.