So I have used java to load only a thumbnail of a youtube video. When the thumb is clicked, the image div is replaced completely with an embed of the video on "autoplay." Everything was working as I wanted BUT
On YouTube when I look at the Analytics/traffic sources the "Unknown — embedded player" views dropped 90%+ to almost nothing as seen on the picture at the above URL. This is apparently because "autoplay" views are not recognized by YouTube as legitimate views which i confirmed on stackoverflow and elsewhere.
So... I want the best of both worlds. I want the fast load speed that comes with loading only the thumb at first AND I want to avoid autoplay so the views actually count on YouTube when the thumb is clicked. My temporary solution is to set autoplay=0 which forces the user to essentially click the same thumb twice, though I would prefer to avoid the redundant click.
Here is a example page from my site that has 4 embedded videos.
