February 4, 2014

Keeping YouTube Views Authentic

 

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.

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.

As YouTube creators, we ask you to be extra careful when working with third-party marketing firms; unfortunately some of them will sell you fake views. If you need help promoting your video, please review our posts about working with third party view service providers and increasing YouTube views.

10 comments:

  1. Sounds like good news to me. Less money being paid to cheats is more money available to pay proper creative people. It really is a win-win situation, as long as you're not one of the losers committing the fraud.

    If only Google put this much effort into listening to complaints about the comments system.

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  2. Starting with this http://www.youtube.com/user/HolaSoyGerman

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  3. Thank you for the information. Does this mean that any video that is being audited will have a + added to the view count? Will this "+" be visible through the API? And will view counts pause are different ranges now, not just around the 300 mark?

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  4. http://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/plasma-http-botnet-steals-stored-passwords-chrome-filezilla

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  5. I think also that every view should be count when people view a video at least 10 second

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  6. Here's an example I think:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJXRqwLGZI0

    The views and the likes don't correspond at all, and the stats are disabled...

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