December 29, 2012
Fake YouTube Views Cut By 2 Billion As Google Audits Record Companies’ Video Channels
Google made good on its promise to
weed out views inflated by artificial means last week ( in December 2012), according to Daily Dot. Record company sites impacted included titans like
Universal Music Group, which reportedly lost 1 billion of its 7 billion views, and
Sony, who lost 850 million views.
The cuts affected marquee names like
Rhianna,
Beyonce and
Justin Bieber. YouTube said in a statement that the
figures had been deliberately, artificially inflated.
Music snobs are enjoying a taste of schadenfreude after a massive audit of YouTube video channels cut
2 billion fake views from record company sites.
“
This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our view count policy,” the company, which is owned by Google, wrote.
The push was enacted to combat hackers and social media promotion sites that built up views and likes on YouTube, making them appear more popular and driving advertising revenue.
Users of sites like
YouLikeHits and
AddMeFast, popular among so-called black hat social optimizers,
bemoaned their losses on
forums following the YouTube purge.
According to the
YouTube terms of service, users “agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, ‘robots,’ ‘spiders,’ or ‘offline readers,’ that accesses the Service in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser.”
As news of the cuts spread, some critics suggested other recording artist social media could be
similarly manipulated.
While the cuts may be seem dire, not every mega-hit was gravely affected. For example, the count for viral juggernaut “
Gangnam Style,” a Universal Music Group jam, is still dancing along at
more than 1 billion views, a YouTube record.
This isn’t the first bit of housecleaning implemented by YouTube this year. In October 2012, Kotaku reported that YouTube would
start ranking its most popular videos by “
engagement” — how long videos are watched —
rather than mere view counts.
The blog suggested such a change threatened to knock “Gangnam Style” off of its invisible horse, but it doesn’t appear to have yet.
Source:
Fake YouTube Views Cut By 2 Billion As Google Audits Record Companies' Video Channels | The Huffington Post