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.'"

Comments

Great

[sheehaje]

My band went from 72 views to 5. Damn you Google!

*phew*

[alphatel]

"Gangnam Style was not affected", thank goodness, I didn't want to watch it another billion times!

Re:Same old tactics

[dkleinsc]

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.

But millions of people look at what's popular when choosing what to buy, and they can't all be wrong, right?

Re:Not so many Bieber fans after all...

[plover]

Now if we could just get confirmation that 90% of the people watching "Here Comes Honey Boo-boo" are bots too...

They ARE mindless robots. Just that they're the flesh and blood kind, so they still get pageviews.

Re:What if Google is wrong?

[Shark]

Uh oh... I post example of work done on my milling machine. The horrible whine sound of the spindle definitely could be interpreted as RIAA copyrighted material, especially given the talent of pop singers lately.