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YouTube Drops 2 Billion Fake Music Industry Views

Posted by samzenpus on from the cure-for-bieber-fever dept.

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.'"

3 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Joe Jobbing of the future? by Piata · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yep. In his case, he felt the competition might be trying to make him disapear. He occassionaly films weddings (which like most wedding services, is completely cut throat) or does videos for the city (which involves bidding on contracts) so if someone out there feels slighted or envious, they can get your video pulled with enough effort.

  2. Re:YES! by rtfa-troll · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm not sure you are getting this. Google suing should be the least of these people's worries. From AFA linked from TFA:

    Google says that these companies violated its terms of services, which prohibits automated methods of inflating view counts

    If they have been faking 1/8th of their viewership, then that was artificially increasing their apparent influence and so share price. The SEC should be coming around damn soon now if a shareholder would just make a complaint.

    Now that would be sweet.

    --
    =~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
  3. Re:YES! by sirlark · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Assuming there's advertising revenue involved in the views as well, artificially inflating your count would constitute fraud wouldn't it. No need for a shareholder complaint.