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.

Comments

Fraud

[Tulsa_Time]

How does Google get away with activities that would be called fraud in any other marketplace ?

Re:Fraud

[Darinbob]

I'd be happy if Youtube just stopped paying for views. The quality of the videos would go up and we'd have fewer people making their careers from posting fluff and begging for subscriptions.

Re:Setup?

[RickyShade]

That's right, because there is no such thing as view/click generator sites that are used by everyone to hype up their content.

Re:"YouTube's credibility"

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad phrasing: Credibility of youtube content vs credibility of youtube stats

Ancient, obvious strategy.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

This would never happen to voting

[mi]

"They've tried to stop it for so many years, but they can't stop it. There's always a way around."

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.

Re:This would never happen to voting

[mi]

What kind of idiot would try to manipulate an election by getting humans to vote one by one when the results can be manipulated by the thousand?

You don't need "thousands". Al Franken got into Senate with (officially) 312 votes — and this allowed the passing of Obamacare.

Earlier, Bush won Florida with a similarly sub-thousand majority — also dramatically affecting the entire nation's life... A few is enough.

Re:This would never happen to voting

[mi]

I guess you are trying to make some racist point

Am I really? Would you care to speculate, which point that might be?

instead of picking on black people like always

Did you know, strawmen are racist?

americans really are that stupid

Now, curiously, here is an actual racist statement, but that's off-topic, of course.

Google and Youtube are broken

[m00sh]

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.

Re:Google and Youtube are broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Google search doesn't even return relevant results anymore but more results that may look like what you ask. Soon just expect that an AI will generate the results on the fly SCIgen style.

Now they even remove keywords from your query to get more irrelevant matches from higher scored sites.

Also the +"" or intext: tags are basically ignored and worse if you insist they start throwing captchas at you.

Unfortunately you will be one of those few people who notice, may be poining it out a couple more will also realize, like when you point out about bad kerning.

Time to rethink monetization

[Vermonter]

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.

Car reviews are flooded with auto generated videos

[BrookHarty]

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.

It ACTUALLY does not happen

[aepervius]

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.

Re:It ACTUALLY does not happen

[DNS-and-BIND]

If those that demand no Voter Identification were concerned for the poor, they'd facilitate the acquisition of ID, not seek ways to avoid it. After all, what's the best job you ever had where you didn't need to identify yourself?

Only ONE party disapproves of measures to make our elections secure, and also your president lied to you. Voter ID is NOT a function of America's "racist past". EVERY COUNTRY THAT'S not a dictatorship has some form of assuring that the person voting is entitled to. EVERY COUNTRY.

NAACP requires photo ID to attend anti-voter-ID protest march

Indian citizens have voter ID and they are buttfuck poor, much poorer than the worst of the American poor.

California liberals allege voter fraud, demand voter ID. Democrats think voter identification laws are important for their party elections, but think they're not important when it comes to our elections.

Maxine Waters, an advocate against voter ID, requires an ID to attend her town hall meeting.

Hillary Clinton's Book Tour. Valid Photo ID Required. Suppressing minority turnout, or is this one of those things that's OK when Democrats do it but wrong when anyone else does it?

Re:It ACTUALLY does not happen

[Mashiki]

You're saying that the poor are too stupid to get their voter-ID card, and the "depressed minorities via disenfranchisement" are too incompetent to get a voter-ID card. Good old bigotry and racism of low expectations.

So is Canada a racist country because you MUST present ID in order to vote? Or is this issue only racist because it directly correlates to the US, thus any form of security of elections is automatically racist, because again those people are too stupid, or too poor to get voter ID.

Re:It ACTUALLY does not happen

[Scroatzilla]

It's apparently not so easy to investigate voter fraud, at least at the federal level. All it does is generate lawsuits... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...

Re:It ACTUALLY does not happen

[mi]

Yes, all of those prove identity. The eligibility can be confirmed trivially from the I-9 form. If having to obtained this documentation for work is acceptable, why is it such an outrage to demand the same for voting?

It is not, of course — you only foam at the mouth, because you suspect (as I do), that your party benefits from the fraud.

Re:It ACTUALLY does not happen

[Darinbob]

Canada does not have the same history of institutionalized racism that we had in the South. Many US states used various election rules as an attempt to restrict voting by minorities - this is basic grade school history. Such as requirements to have paid a poll tax (except if your grandfather voted), literacy tests, and so forth. The states pushing hardest for voter ID laws just happen to those that also engaged in disenfranchisement of minorities during segregation. To many people, any election move by a former unapalogetic segregationist state is viewed with high suspicion.

So based on history, any attempt to have a mandatory fee to vote or obtain a voting token is suspicious, or anything resembling past literacy tests, and so forth. Anyone who is surprised that minorities are wary of such moves has clearly not studied history.

Voting is a right, not a privilege.

Re:It ACTUALLY does not happen

[mi]

No, most jobs only require a social security number

The above is a demonstrable falsehood:

All employers must complete and retain Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, for every person they hire for employment after Nov. 6, 1986, in the U.S. as long as the person works for pay or other type of payment.