Over here. Then at the bottom of the article is the counter-narrative of Universal and the other labels switching their emphasis to VEVO as their own proprietary video distribution system. So I guess I was wondering what other sources can corroborate whether this is primarily a re-settling of corporate territory with normal users as collateral damage or a broader anti-fraud campaign by youtube. I saw this a while back but it doesn't seem like a lot more has come up on it.
I am slightly confused. Why do any of the labels care about their view counts going down? Do they get paid per view? The article didn't go into detail.
They paid good money for those views. It appears that Google's solution is to remove the video from YouTube completely, which seems a bit excessive.
From Youtube's perspective, I assume that they get some kind of pay per view effect, but I have no idea how that works with corporate accounts. From the labels' points of view, I'm betting they use them as benchmarks for the popularity of their artists and are juking the stats accordingly. But yeah, that's why I was asking if there were other sources on this.
From another story on that site, it appears that there is some kind of cottage industry for creating bots and selling the use of them to inflate view counts/FB likes and shares. I'm guessing that Google is cracking down on faked view counts in general, and there may not be a financial consideration involved. At the lower levels, Google is made up of, well, a bunch of cyber-hippies from my experience, so going on a crusade against faking your numbers and not caring about how it may affect their bank balance is pretty believable to me.
Cyber-hippies and math nerds. I've known a few people who've gone to Google and they are exactly the type of people who would take these actions to try to get more "pure" data because they want to mathematically model actual activity and not paid-for-fakery.
Part of it too is that bot networks are often sourced by malware and viruses. Google cracking down on the use of said networks will have a trickle down effect to making them less valuable to the larger players. Botnets are a big problem everywhere, but especially on app stores. Dissuading companies from using them will be good for everyone.
Sure, why wouldn't views be seen as an important marketing statistic? Aren't page views for websites used similarly? If you are a small business looking to work with a marketing firm, many firms will want to know about your company's FB page/Twitter account/website/Yelp page and many of them require you to have a minimum number of views/likes/followers/unique visitors before they even want to deal with you.
