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The Flourishing Business of Fake YouTube Views (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Martin Vassilev makes a good living selling fake views on YouTube videos. Working from home in Ottawa, he has sold about 15 million views so far this year, putting him on track to bring in more than $200,000, records show. Mr. Vassilev, 32, does not provide the views himself. His website, 500Views.com, connects customers with services that offer views, likes and dislikes generated by computers, not humans. When a supplier cannot fulfill an order, Mr. Vassilev -- like a modern switchboard operator -- quickly connects with another. "I can deliver an unlimited amount of views to a video," Mr. Vassilev said in an interview. "They've tried to stop it for so many years, but they can't stop it. There's always a way around."
[...] Just as other social media companies have been plagued by impostor accounts and artificial influence campaigns, YouTube has struggled with fake views for years. The fake-view ecosystem of which Mr. Vassilev is a part can undermine YouTube's credibility by manipulating the digital currency that signals value to users. While YouTube says fake views represent just a tiny fraction of the total, they still have a significant effect by misleading consumers and advertisers.
[...] Just as other social media companies have been plagued by impostor accounts and artificial influence campaigns, YouTube has struggled with fake views for years. The fake-view ecosystem of which Mr. Vassilev is a part can undermine YouTube's credibility by manipulating the digital currency that signals value to users. While YouTube says fake views represent just a tiny fraction of the total, they still have a significant effect by misleading consumers and advertisers.
How does Google get away with activities that would be called fraud in any other marketplace ?
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
That's right, because there is no such thing as view/click generator sites that are used by everyone to hype up their content.
Bad phrasing: Credibility of youtube content vs credibility of youtube stats
It really wouldn't be surprising at this point.
Fake views are a thing since before YouTube or even Googke even existed. I remember guys at every big dotcom bubble era company setting up bots at their home computers in 1999.
Then ad companies started to demand beacons and track IP adresses. After which botnet services sprung up. Often owned by those very employees. (One was by a "friend" of mine, and used all CounterStrike servers, since he had a super-popular CS mod.)
I am not the least bit surprised that YT views are as fake all all reviews on all shopping sites and IMDB since forever.
(In the past, it helped to train an expert system / bayesian filter, to only count those who actually made real comments. Today, the bots make better comments than the so-called real humans.)
While YouTube says fake views represent just a tiny fraction of the total,
Sure, because they can only count detected fake views. Which brings us back to the original claim of the fake view seller, namely that there is always a way around detection.
This would never happen to elections. There is absolutely no need to burden the voters with having to prove their identity and eligibility, and anyone telling you otherwise is a hateful racist.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Google's performance has gone down over the years. It used to bring up better results but now it's mostly from the same sites and it's 99% the same as bing or any other search engine. Forum threads, blog posts don't come up often and it's mostly results from corporate websites.
Youtube also has another weird problem. It's recommendation has gotten absolutely click baitey only. It used to suggest really interesting videos but now all it suggests are click baits from a handful of content creators.
Google and Youtube ranking has been gamed way too much now, and Google in turn have really neutered their algorithms.
I am amazed the internet still values "views" and "clicks". Until advertisers stop placing value on such stupid metrics, this is going to be a problem. They should be focusing on actual sales and paying people based on that.
If you had a car dealership where instead of commission for sales, the sales people were paid based on how many people came in to look at cars, you bet there would be rampant fraud there as well.
Well, the dynamics of this space are interesting - you have the normal human eye balls that consume the media and are recorded as "views", "likes", "+1s", etc. These stats drive the ads - their ranking, prices, shows as well as various charges/payments made against/to clients. All known, expected and documented. (all of that driven by Google's internal infrastructure)
Now enter 3rd-party software running on hundreds (thousands?) of hosts, programmatically doing what was initially deemed to be "for human eyes only". The economics go to shit and so the programs are now trying to tell humans apart from programs, while the other side is pretending to be human.
This entire thing looks like the never-ending "adblock" discussion, but elevated to the next level. While I have a strong option on the old topic, this new thing is obviously a lot more nuanced. There are probably fake/robotic Google accounts in play, a bunch of AWS instances and may be even a botnet - none of that is cool. Yet, sticking it to the Man (using software tools) is kinda cool.
Trying to look at new cars reviews on youtube is a PITA, a large portion are text readers reading off a the same blog. Same goes for reviews on appliances, when I tried to search on air conditioners. I report them, they never go away, youtube is slacking hard allowing this crap to ruin youtube reviews. And the fake views are promoting these fake videos.
Its a circle of fakeness.
See there is a difference to say in a cynic ton pretending to do sarcasm "This would never happen to elections. There is absolutely no need to burden the voters with having to prove their identity and eligibility, and anyone telling you otherwise is a hateful racist." and the ACTUALITY of it happening.
When checked the occurrence of true voter willful fraud is incredibly minimal, a few voters out of millions *at most* (most story you hear about people registered at two places are people having moved on but forgot to de-register at the old place , and there is no fraud, they only vote once) . But some people pretend it happens very often and want to impose verification which are very difficult to pass for poor (as in no money) voters. See such assholes long saw the correlation between those mostly poor demographic and a certain political arty, so what is the great thing about pretend-voter-fraud laws for them is that it kicks out those voters and so enable to skew to vote toward THEIR party. e.g. exclude homeless or people working 2*40 jobs the one because they have no address, the other because they have no time left to pass through hoops. Disenfranchise enough people and you can skew election.
here is the thing though : voter fraud is incredibly rare and negligible. You want to pretend otherwise ? Then advance evidence, like peer review or verifiable study. Go ahead. All those which exists out there all shows voter fraud to be extremely negligible.
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"... car reviews on youtube"? What? Why would that be a thing? That doesn't make any sense at all.
I don't respond to AC's.
they're either branding or they're political ads. I get ads for HBO making sure I know what HBO is. There's no sales pitch. No "Call to Action". Just a vague 7 second advert about HBO to make sure I know they exist. I got Coke ads until the White Supremacists scared them off. And don't get me started on political ads. I subscribe to a raft of left wing channels so I get bombarded with Praguer U ads (which confused the hell out of me until I learned that Praguer U is not a university, it's a right wing think tank/propaganda mill).
Online advertising doesn't work well to drive sales. What it does do well is make sure you're thinking positively about a given product line.
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....Its a circle of fakeness.
It's -- technically -- a circle-jerk of fakeness
Youtube also has another weird problem. It's recommendation has gotten absolutely click baitey only. It used to suggest really interesting videos but now all it suggests are click baits from a handful of content creators.
And the main culprit for that is your own human brain.
Youtube mostly uses machine learning nowadays for its recommendation system.
Automatic systems designed to increase the time spent online watching, so that Google can earn more money.
The AI powering Youtube autonomously learn that showing you video A instead of Video B (given that you've watched X, Y, Z) is more likely to keep you around.
And due to how human brains work, it *happens* that video A is going to be click baitey because that's what works the best at attracting humans attention.
The AI is simply independently rediscovering and learning on its own what has been studied since a long time regarding, e.g. , content on the TV that attracts attention (answer : emotions, specially violent ones).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
From the wikipedia link:
"He made the allegations based on a report by the New Hampshire House of Representatives saying that of the 6,540 voters who had registered to vote on Election Day, only 1,014 of those voters had obtained a New Hampshire drivers license by August 30 of the following year. The Washington Post was able to quickly contact 3 such voters who said that they were college students and kept the drivers license from their home state.[97]"
Not sure the "with a statistical certainty" stands up in my reading. It *may* be as you allege, but the WP ( could be a biased source ) contacted three voters in the "illegitimate voter" pool, they were college students and did not get NH drivers licenses. 3 out of 1014? Could be that ll 1011 others were not legitimate. But using "didnt get a NH DL" as your mark that they moved there is not a great mark. Anyone who was a college student might not bother getting an NH DL. Someone who moved there, but didnt own a car would not get one. Some may have delayed getting a DL, as going and standing in line at the DMV isnt terribly appealing.
My assessment, you have some more work to do to prove voter fraud.
Because people can't read anymore, they have to watch a 20 minute video instead.
So, you're saying that they're auto generated auto videos?
Thanks for reminding me how annoying it is when I'm looking specifically for text instructions on how to configure something, instructions and diagrams on how to fix something, or video game location maps, and all the results are f'ing youtube videos put together by some jackass in love with their editing software. I want a quick reference, not a video I have to scan through, pause, rewind, and eventually give up on.
I remember when Russel Crow was being interviewed about a movie he starred in. The interviewer asked how historically accurate the movie was. Crow assured him it was fairly true to history. "However," he added, "if you get all your history from movies, you have other problems." I think this principle applies to people who are not discerning about where they are getting their "news" and are untaught how to filter.