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YouTube View Fraud... does Youtube benefit?
Sceptre
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I recently entered into a canadian video competition, in which the first stage of the competition was to bring in as many views as possible. The winner receives fifteen thousand dollars ($$$). The way it worked was if you were in the top 5 for views (Tracked via Youtube), you moved onto the next phase of the competition, in which your videos would be judged for their creativity/quality and appeal. etc.
My friends and I banded together to make a video, having a lot of fun with it and getting to do a lot of cool things behind the camera.
We social networked the shit out of it. We handed out slips of paper on campus with the link to try and drive the views up, we even offered to host a party for one of the more sizeable residences on campus if we won, driving our views higher.
For the first little bit, it appeared that this strategy was working quite well, we quickly pulled in a sizeable amount of views and interest, and for a long time held the #1 spot. We were all very happy with how the video had done, and felt assured that we would be able to take one of the top 5 spots. How wrong we were...
Within the last couple of weeks, competitors videos have been pulling views like mad, at rates that seem completely unfeasible. In the span of about 5 hours, one of them in particular was able to pull in roughly 18 000 views, with only a handful of comments and ratings. After some marginal research, I discovered that the views on youtube were not hard to fake, indeed, several commercial programs existed to do just that. One of the worst offenders had their video removed after a few days, but several others remain. This led me to wonder...
Is Youtube capable of telling what constitutes a 'real' view? Perhaps more importantly, would they care? In the interest of driving their own metrics and marketing numbers up, perhaps in the long run this helps them? After some more reading, I read that quite a few popular youtube partners seem particularly guilty of view fraud. Would it not be in youtube's best interests to stop them from doing this? Or do they have a system that separates the reported views from paying views.
This debate will serve two purposes, first of all, being the selfish whore I am, I want people to watch our video. Secondly, what do you think of the way youtube and other websites monitors views? Should they install stricter countermeasures ? Or does these views help drive the system, letting lesser known users come to the fore front?
My friends and I banded together to make a video, having a lot of fun with it and getting to do a lot of cool things behind the camera.
We social networked the shit out of it. We handed out slips of paper on campus with the link to try and drive the views up, we even offered to host a party for one of the more sizeable residences on campus if we won, driving our views higher.
For the first little bit, it appeared that this strategy was working quite well, we quickly pulled in a sizeable amount of views and interest, and for a long time held the #1 spot. We were all very happy with how the video had done, and felt assured that we would be able to take one of the top 5 spots. How wrong we were...
Within the last couple of weeks, competitors videos have been pulling views like mad, at rates that seem completely unfeasible. In the span of about 5 hours, one of them in particular was able to pull in roughly 18 000 views, with only a handful of comments and ratings. After some marginal research, I discovered that the views on youtube were not hard to fake, indeed, several commercial programs existed to do just that. One of the worst offenders had their video removed after a few days, but several others remain. This led me to wonder...
Is Youtube capable of telling what constitutes a 'real' view? Perhaps more importantly, would they care? In the interest of driving their own metrics and marketing numbers up, perhaps in the long run this helps them? After some more reading, I read that quite a few popular youtube partners seem particularly guilty of view fraud. Would it not be in youtube's best interests to stop them from doing this? Or do they have a system that separates the reported views from paying views.
This debate will serve two purposes, first of all, being the selfish whore I am, I want people to watch our video. Secondly, what do you think of the way youtube and other websites monitors views? Should they install stricter countermeasures ? Or does these views help drive the system, letting lesser known users come to the fore front?
Sceptre on
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But I'm guessing they go buy clicks..
I'm mainly confused as to why such a system would exist when they have their partners program.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
I imagine it's not their top priority
youtube is full of stupid people who i can imagine do this for hours wondering when the real video is supposed to show up
You're probably right. If south park is correct, 25% of the population is retarded, and half of them are on youtube posting comments
25% just seems so low.
Sturgeon's Second Law applies to people as well.
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
Youtube, like any popular site, is a distributed system. They don't have one server, they have hundreds. Probably thousands. Thousands of instances of apache serving millions of GETs a minute. They probably write tebibytes worth of access logs every day.
Can you detect suspicious repeat activity in logs? Sure. Is running any kind of routine pattern analysis against that much data feasible? Not really, no. Not on a regular basis. It's the kind of thing you do when you think someone is attacking your gear.
You should make a film about how to fake views, and submit it to the contest accusing all your competitors of faking views.