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Business News Digital
YouTube to step up “fraudulent view” monitoring
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 5 February 2014
YouTube is stepping up its efforts to crackdown on “fraudulent views”, where companies use sneaky methods to make it look like their videos on the platform are way more popular than they really are. So, be warned sneaky YouTube stat manipulators. What am I talking about, no such devious people would ever subscribe to the CMU Daily. We wouldn’t let them. Bad people.
Confirming all this yesterday, YouTube’s Philipp Pfeiffenberger wrote in a blog post: “YouTube isn’t just a place for videos, it’s a place for meaningful human interaction. Whether it’s views, likes, or comments, these interactions both represent and inform how creators connect with their audience. That’s why we take the accuracy of these interactions very seriously. When some bad actors try to game the system by artificially inflating view counts, they’re not just misleading fans about the popularity of a video, they’re undermining one of YouTube’s most important and unique qualities”
He went on: “As part of our long-standing effort to keep YouTube authentic and full of meaningful interactions, we’ve begun periodically auditing the views a video has received. While in the past we would scan views for spam immediately after they occurred, starting today we will periodically validate the video’s view count, removing fraudulent views as new evidence comes to light. We don’t expect this approach to affect more than a minuscule fraction of videos on YouTube, but we believe it’s crucial to improving the accuracy of view counts and maintaining the trust of our fans and creators”.
Presumably the sneaky YouTube stat fixers have all taken note. I mean, over 15 billion people have read Pfeiffenberger’s blog post already. Hey, hang on, that can’t be right. Sneaky Pfeiffenberger.
