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YouTube Drops 2 Billion Fake Music Industry Views
An anonymous reader writes "YouTube has dropped 2 billion fake music industry views and their offending videos. From the article: 'Google made good on its promise to weed out views inflated by artificial means last week, 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. '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.'"
lawsuit please... fuck *IAA
My band went from 72 views to 5. Damn you Google!
"Gangnam Style was not affected", thank goodness, I didn't want to watch it another billion times!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
First it's dropping views. Then they drop offending videos. Then they drop the copyrighted videos. Way to come from underneath, Google.
My brother is a local film maker in a small town and he got his demo reel pulled from Youtube for "artificially inflating views". Naturally my brother is a little confused by this as he's not savvy enough about the internet to even know how to do such things. Obviously he didn't go to his video and hit refresh a couple thousand times and it's possible some of his friends did but that's not his doing.
The worst part is he's left no recourse. Google pulled the video and warned that if another of his videos sees the same artifically inflated views, his account would be banned so now he's looking at Vimeo as an alternative.
I can't decide if the people who took advantage of the ranking system are to blame, or if the system itself is. I certainly can't blame anyone for trying to inflate numbers by utilizing a loophole left by Google or YouTube; I would probably do the same thing if it meant making more money. Even though I'm glad that Google and YouTube closed the "vulnerability", it does lend fuel to the idea that we're really just seeing the Internet that Google wants us to see.
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Back in the day it was payola to radio djs and buying back your own records in the stores.
Now it's scripted youtube visits.
Same tactics from the producers, but also same behavior from consumers who have to know if something is popular before adopting it.
I suggest not looking at counters when choosing stuff for yourself.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
That suggests a way to suppress videos that some object to. Just pump them up by a few thousand with obviously faked views and let Google pull the video and ban the account.
More importantly, when were the fake views generated? Could it be before any of these people were popular? And that artificially inflating views caused them to be artificially popular? *facepalm*
Makes me wonder about the counting method.
Would they:
a. count each pageview
b. count after video played last frame
c. combination of both
?
If they would only count pageviews, how about counting people watching videos with an app or on a smart tv (which I regularly do).
KERNEL PANIC -SIGFAULT AT ADDRESS #51A54D07
"The cuts affected marquee names like Rhianna, Beyonce and Justin Bieber."
This restores a tiny bit of my faith in humanity. Now if we could just get confirmation that 90% of the people watching "Here Comes Honey Boo-boo" are bots too...
0 1 - just my two bits
The brand managers who commission stuff like this are typically inexperienced, low-paid and overworked. They don't know what the fuck they are doing but they know they've got to get it done quickly and for next to no money. You'd be shocked at how low the budgets they have to work with are for digital stuff - sure, drop a couple of hundred grand on a music video to promote their latest single, but good luck getting more than ten grand for a website that they'll be using for years. They also have the habit of following the crowd and simply using the suppliers and techniques their colleagues use. So it doesn't surprise me that a few of them decided to use cheap off-shored clicks to inflate their results, or that once a few of them did it, it spread like wildfire within their ranks.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/28/youtube-video-views-disappear-migrate
Views and videos just got shifted over to VEVO.
The billions of views they lost is about the same amount of money the music industry has lost due to piracy.
Who said perception is reality? Just make your own, it's easier.
it's like finding a [lone woman] on the ground: you should [take her] to the [hospital], but frankly, aside from the [family and friends of the woman], who cares if you don't? You won't get punished for [raping her], but you might not get rewarded for it, whereas if you [rape her], the reward is guaranteed.
Like most analogies, this analogy is not exact. Say I find the woman while riding a bicycle to or from work. I wouldn't even think of assaulting her, but helping her would have a substantial cost to me. For example, how do you recommend that I transport her to the hospital? Likewise, how would someone who depends on public transit afford the bus fare and lost wages to carry a found purse with no ID to the police station?
I know, -1 Flamebait, but ...
has anybody here every seriously looked at the process to report and have removed infringing material from youtube? if you try, the first thing google/youtube does is basically threaten you with jail and worse if you dont happen to be the copyright holder. they make it as slow and painful as possible though probably within what is allowed by law. why? google has a vested interest in keeping the pirated material on there.
it would take me all of one day at most to find over 1000 movies just with the search "full movie", each of which has a view count of 10,000+. Google could too, but they have no interest in this. They play this game where they pretend they are some innocent service, and of course meanhwhile providing de facto anonymity to serial uploaders (anybody even ONCE prosecuted for uploading pirated stuff? at worst it's "account suspended, make a new one homer jo jo junior shabadoo"). meanwhile, google collects HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS in ad revenue on infringing material. Oh, and when something is pointed out to be infringing, does google contact the rightsholder and offer them a the money or at least a split? you must be joking.
If youtube were anything but a giant company armed with masses of lawyers *and didnt enjoy the popular support of those below who find it useful and who are about to make all sorts of yesbuts and rationalizations, it would have been shut down for conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement a long time ago.
yes, i find it useful too. but i'm under no illusions that the system is any way a fair to the rightsholders off of whom youtube is making massive profits especially during that delay between upload and takedown.
again - actually try the takedown process before you flame away. it's diabolical.
I suggest not looking at counters when choosing stuff for yourself.
Unless a product or service has a substantial network effect, such that it becomes more useful as the user base grows. For example, people might not want to buy a smartphone that only has 10,000 units sold because not a lot of developers of useful applications would find it profitable to target a market of 10,000.
They have discussed plans to rank by how long people tend to watch the particular video ('engagement')
YouTube makes engagement statistics available to the uploader.
"On Thursday, when YouTube sent out its regular reports on view counts, one data company, SocialBlade, noticed that the channel views for Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group saw its channel count sliced by about 2 billion views.
That led some folks to conclude that the views were "fake" and that nefarious "black hat" techniques were being cooked up by the labels to falsely inflate their views. The truth, however, isn't nearly as sexy.
Interviews Billboard.biz conducted with YouTube, label executives and analysts from Next Big Sound told a very different tale. Here's what really happened.
Read more at http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/what-really-happened-to-sony-and-universal-1008059892.story#3BCYRJW518fJqDPC.99 "
According to Billboard most of the 2 Billion views were removed because the videos were moved off the channel. Only a few million views were removed because of spamming. Basically the views were moved from the UMG channel to the Vevo channel. http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps2/945498-shin-megami-tensei-persona-4/faqs/53550
"As news of the cuts spread, some critics suggested other recording artist social media could be similarly manipulated."
Well, that explains this rather bold request on Elance:
https://www.elance.com/j/build-software-that-makes-itunes-sales-go-up/36006811/
"I need a talented freelancer developer to develop a software tool for Mac, or online web based which we input an iTunes Link for a Song or an App. Then it automatically increases their sale to the top charts.
I've seen 2 companies do it. i will give more details about it on message to work on how its done."
This must be rather widespread, as the employer references existing solutions. The employer seems to think this is OK enough to make an open request in a public place. (Wouldn't it be a shame if this employer were slashdotted?)
Yet posting "jihadi" videos that are clearly in violation not just of YouTube regs but of US law is not a problem with GoogTube...
Isn't this the best way to fix society.
Find any video you don't like (cough, bieb, cough).
Setup a bot to create fake clicks on the video. Video gets taken down. World becomes better place?
The article at the top is wrong. Sony didn't lose 850 million views. Sony youtube channel lost views because sony moved all its vidoes off its youtube channel. They were moved to the Vimio youtube channel. Google did some housekeeping and removed channel views if the video is no longer there. Video views were not effected. Only about 1.5 million views were removed because of spammy sites that start a video when you first access the page.
Argg. Stupid copy paste didn't work. Sorry for the bad link. Didn't mean to redirect people to a persona 4 faq. Now slashdot knows I suck at RPGs and read guides. here is billboard link
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/what-really-happened-to-sony-and-universal-1008059892.story
YouTube, can you look into this worthless, hookless piece of shit?
I dare you to force yourself to listen to the entire thing.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I can best describe my feelings with a meme.
google would have blocked their account all together wouldn't they? I hope they follow their own terms this time too.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
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In the highly-edited age, we take it all for granted. Sigh.
I come here for the love
I really don't care how many views a video has...
Most people have something called empathy. It is demonstrably true that people usually have stronger emapthic feelings towards people who are close to them (family, friends, etc.) rather than strangers, but most people still retain a degree of empathy for strangers. Judging by your responses in this thread you, frankly, sound like a sociopath. Or perhaps you are closer to the "high" end on the autistic spectrum.
Either way it doesn't sound like your empathy "circuitry" is functioning normally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
If it was a regular YouTube user that done their the account would have been deleted.