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Record labels faking Youtube video views
KissesDontLie
Posts: 450 Forum Member
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Major recording companies have lost more than two billion video views on YouTube after the video sharing website cracked down on alleged fake views.
The biggest hit was taken by Universal, home of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber, which lost more than one billion views from its total of seven billion.
Sony was second hardest hit, with the label behind such stars as Alicia Keys, Rita Ora and Labrinth losing more than 850million views in a single day.
The dramatic falls, highlighted by figures compiled by YouTube statistics analysts at SocialBlade, came after YouTube conducted an audit of its viewing figures aimed at combating black hat view count-building techniques. This is when hackers artificially build up the numbers of views or likes on a YouTube video - enabling them to make clips appear far more popular than they really are and increase their exposure on the site. The viewcount culls will be damaging to the labels affected since YouTube is now web's premier outlet for music videos. Over four billion hours of video are watched by over 800million unique visitors to the site each month.
The Daily Dot reported how many of the channels affected - which also include ones belonging to Michael Jackson, Chris Brown and Beyonce, among others - had also had many videos deleted.
Oh dear
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I think many of us suspected that this went on right back into the noughties when Myspace was popular and that some of these rags to riches stories were artificially contrived.
I bet it even happens with lesser-known artists. Record labels giving a video a large amount of views is a good way to help push along a new artist. They can go to radio stations and say "You should play this new up-and-coming pop star. Her song has already got 15 million views on Youtube, it's going to be huge".
PSY faked the views to get initial kick (10million or so), but that was enough to get into youtube leader board in August.
Yes, the same FB fans / likes and Twitter too but not sure about airplay.
Not to mention, an "inactive account" doesn't mean it is a "fake" account which was bought, it simply means that the user doesn't Tweet. There will be a lot of people who signed up to see what the fuss is about, followed the immediate suggestions and never returned. Then of course you have spambots, which add you when triggered by certain activity.
It probably does happen, but we don't know actual figures.
It's different with faking YouTube views because either the video was viewed X amount of times...or it wasn't. No grey area.
Youtube is the most difficult one, because google account is associated with it. Multiple accounts need phone verification etc, still people (hackers) find new loop holes to fake views. Also many of the fake views are just because of careless handling of patches by youtube.
FB is similar to twitter, too easy to get as many likes / fans compare to youtube.
If I could find that article I would link it, but I honestly can't find it online. The article said that the inactive accounts were made by the record label to make the popstar appear more popular than they actually are.
Did they have proof or was it spun from that aforementioned website calculator?
There's companies out there that you can pay money to, and they give you lots of extra Twitter followers. Even a lot of underground rappers and dance DJs do that.
Like the company might have tens of thousands of Twitter accounts, and you can pay them to make a certain number of their accounts follow you.
The problem is, at least with the smaller underground artists, it's always so obvious when they suddenly have 50 extra followers per day for a couple of weeks.
As for Twitter followers, it wouldn't suprise me if that happened also. I've seen ads on ebay offering 35,000+ followers for £15. But then I've never trusted Twitter as a reliable source to gauge someone's popularity. I'll stick with my weedy 100 followers who actually interact with me
I remember this. Avril's song, Girlfriend, really wanted to overtake Evolution of Dance, which was the biggest Youtube clip at the time. They eventually did and I remember reading somewhere that the label or Avril demanding $2 million for achieving such a feat
Some people just sign up to follow and don't tweet
Don't know if that's true lol, but back in 2007 time, when Youtube was in its younger days, you could increase the view count endlessly simply by refreshing the page. A lot of Avril fans used this program that would automatically refresh the page repeatedly for you, and you could have it running in the background, whilst you were doing other stuff.
That sort of thing doesn't work with Youtube now though, after that they took measures to prevent views being rigged like that.
I felt bad for the Avril fans though, since the video got deleted in the end lmao!