YouTube’s fake views economy

https://theoutline.com/post/3804/inside-youtube-s-fake-views-economy

by lnguyen • 8 years ago

103 42 8 years ago

Mononokay• 8 years ago

That site's ads were . . . surprisingly tasteful. Got around my adblocker because they were hosted by the advertisers, not an ad company, and, while I wasn't a fan of the Samsung auto-playing video, the Mailchip ad was novel. It felt like reading a classier newspaper, which I can't say I dislike, personally. Plain-CSS ads are the way to go.

misterbowfinger• 8 years ago

The Outline is really beautiful. They do a great job of designing a modern digital publication.

castlegloom• 8 years ago

I don't even try blocking the Outline's ads. They blend so easily into their actual content, and they're unobtrusive.

erickhill• 8 years ago

The perpetually animated squiggle at the top of the article, though, was super annoying. I felt an odd sense of relief when I scrolled down to get that thing off my screen.

Then each link I hovered over squiggled, too.

sverige• 8 years ago

Squiggle is the new blink, only more annoying, which I didn't think was possible. It should be sent straight to hell, no cigarette.

rwz• 8 years ago

The article starts with putting Jordan Peterson in the same cohort as Alex Jones and crisis actors conspiracy peddlers. I’m not a Peterson fan, but those kind of comparisons strike me as extremely misinformed and dishonest, and undermines the whole credibility of the article by a lot

TimJYoung• 8 years ago

Yeah, that struck me as odd, also. Whatever your feelings are about Jordan Peterson, he's definitely not in the same camp as Alex Jones.

wincy• 8 years ago

A lot of links are just other stories written by the same author, as well. Pretty clearly has an agenda.

I’ll say it. Jordan Peterson has been a positive influence in my life. I’ve watched hundreds of hours of his lectures on YouTube. I started a book club to read his recommended books such as Gulag Archipelago, Brave New World, 1984, and The Rape of Nanking. It has been a difficult and important experience for me.

Reading Dostoyevsky was eye opening, if just for the fact that as much as people change, we stay the same, and the Communists were using some of the same idealistic arguments for changing the world in 1860s Russia that they are now. The idea that we are simply products of social conditioning, the tabula rasa and nothing more, the victims of our upbringing, were all central tenants in the severity of punishments for people being sent to Gulag in the Soviet Union. Prostitution was 3 years and being a nun was 10 Years. It technically wasn’t illegal to be a Christian, but teaching your children Christian values was! Families were purposely torn apart.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that learning more history, and just how badly things can go wrong, is very important and anyone who encourages people to seek out that history on their own is good in my book.

snowpanda• 8 years ago

The downvotes of your comment once again confirm how tolerant HN is of different opinions. The people downvoting you are the same people who call themselves progressive and open-minded. As long as they agree with it of course.

danso• 8 years ago

Not a Jordan Peterson fan but don't think you should've been downvoted for complaining about the comparisons.

Falling32• 8 years ago

Peterson galvanizes the alt-right and he also pushes ridiculous conspiracy theories. His conspiracy theories are much more mundane than the likes of Alex Jones and crisis actors proponents, but that likely makes him more dangerous.

I'd say he very much belongs there.

e9• 8 years ago

"pushes ridiculous conspiracy theories", can you give an example?

CWuestefeld• 8 years ago

I don't even know who he is, but the blatant politicization of the issue immediately turned me off to the whole article.

frgtpsswrdlame• 8 years ago

Past youtubers were able to buy views in order to generate social proof. Any new youtuber won't be able to take this same shortcut. Maybe youtube should consider hiding the viewcount of videos under a certain amount, say <5000, in order to give people a shot again.

justrobert• 8 years ago

The view count itself isn't why they are buying views, it is the ranking in search and related videos.

I find youtube/twitch have the same problems as the CPM industry. If you punish the provider of content for negative viewer action you provide a means for competition to cheaply force the content creator out of the market.

This is why twitch doesn't punish view botting, as any viewer could spend $5 to shut down a $50k/day stream.

If youtube really does use a guilty until proven innocent method then they are just punishing honest content creators that don't understand the dynamics of online media.

philfrasty• 8 years ago

The far bigger problem from my POV which is not described in the article is manipulation of YouTube trends. This is to some extent related to buying views but needs a special kind of attention.

A few weeks back I noticed weird videos in the German YouTube trends, things like "cheap iPhone cases buy now" with channels that had zero subs. A day later there were 3 of these videos in the trends, the next day 6, then 50% of the trends were full of this. A guy with 0 subs even made a video explaining that he does this kind of manipulation for a living...and unsurprisingly the video made it into the trends the same day.

Simply buying views has very little effect (except on maybe advertisers that pay you) but gaining massive exposure through being featured in the trending videos is big.

dalbasal3• 8 years ago

Discovery on youtube is pretty poor, imo.

I suppose it's a lot better than FB (we decide what you see), and the navigation model (search & browse a database) is what I want. But overall, it's worse than most porn sites.

These things have feedback loops and 3rd order effects. If discovery worked differently, it's not just what people see that gets affected. Pretty soon, what gets created is affected as the market reacts.

This problem is kind of reminiscent of Google SEO/spam problems, but youtube seems a lot worse than search ever was. SEO-spam, clickbait & stuff that hovers just over the spam threshold.. these are pretty dominant.

"Monetization" was another example of market poorly handled. It just did not reward the kind of thing youtube should want to reward.

InclinedPlane• 8 years ago

Indeed. I've been waiting for discovery on youtube to get better, and waiting, and waiting.

I'm subscribed to a lot of channels (mostly sciency and maker stuff) and whenever I got to the "home" tab it's basically just everything from the channels I've already subscribed to, which isn't very helpful. There is some sort of deep laziness going on at youtube which extends across the entire platform. It's very frustrating to watch so many creators put up good content and then have the platform basically fumble handling those creators year after year.

dalbasal3• 8 years ago

Try the home tab in incognito. Talk show clips, movie promos & tabloid-esqu stuff.

I get that these things get a lot of view, but... have a little taste. It's like youtube doesn't have an opinion about what's good about youtube. Very Google-ey, but this hit a very obvious plateau.

IMO, Youtube just needs some opinions. Don't be so afraid to call something "good."

John_KZ• 8 years ago

Discovery was ruined on purpose. I will always rant about this. Youtube wants to control what you see, that has always been the case since Google took over. Right now it's nearly impossible to research something specific on youtube. You searches are automatically "corrected": I search terms in one language and get results in another, google tries to semanticaly interpret what I search (and typically wrongly, ie "temperature differential" --> car differntial videos because they're more popular and profitable). Results aren't complete (they probably create a short search table/cache every few hours based on a finite, semantically-defined number of categories), you can't properly filter by dates, views or any other criterion. Also the "related" videos are often non-related extremely effective clickbait, based on what they know you'll to binge on, even if you don't want to.

I hate youtube wholeheartedly and Google by extension. I don't know if I'm lucky or unlucky to be aware of the vast amounts of data they hide from public view.

Every day hundreds of people create new channels making interesting, thought-provoking and informative videos, and youtube decides to hide them in favour of clickbait garbage and shitty ads, and take away all means you have to discover them.

cambalache• 8 years ago

Indeed. As a person who routinely browse the web in 2+ languages it is infuriating how Google "corrects" you,it is worst in new devices I concede because with time you can adjust some search settings, but still. As much as I like machine learning (despite the hype) , I really fear for the future of the web where big company algorithms "curate" all content for you.

zombieprocesses• 8 years ago

Discovery was ruined on purpose.

Bingo. And it has gotten worse in recent months as they had to censor and cater to the mainstream media.

Results aren't complete (they probably create a short search table/cache every few hours based on a finite, semantically-defined number of categories)

Also, heavily weighted towards paying customers and their own pet projects. Some days, youtube is just filled with SNL, late night show, movie trailers, logan paul, youtube drama, etc.

Every day hundreds of people create new channels making interesting, thought-provoking and informative videos, and youtube decides to hide them in favour of clickbait garbage and shitty ads, and take away all means you have to discover them.

I remember just a few years ago, one of the fun things to do was go down youtube's rabbit hole. Now, youtube is just another managed and curated platform to funnel you to certain corporate interests.

Even when stephen hawking pass away, the only thing on youtube was CNN's video of it. What a marked difference from a few years ago when steve jobs passed away.

Sadly, youtube is just becoming a "tv platform" now. Which is a shame.

garysieling3• 8 years ago

I got so frustrated with youtube discovery that I built my own search, although only for talks - https://www.findlectures.com/

dalbasal3• 8 years ago

Cheers. I love these replies on hn. Me: bitch, bitch, complain. You: here I fixed that. :)

mistermann3• 8 years ago

This is brilliant, how did you do it, scraping or via an API? I'd love to do something similar for different subject areas.

jgh• 8 years ago

Is it possible to even find small creators in a large category? For example I was looking up pubg videos the other day but it's just pages and pages of videos with 1m+ views. I was a bit curious to see what the lower-end creators were like but I wasn't able to figure out how.

edgarvaldes• 8 years ago

Something like millionshort.com would be interesting

billdybas• 8 years ago

If you're looking to discover more videos / creators, I run https://channelsuurf.com. We curate under-viewed / under-subscribed channels from YouTube. If you have any favorites you want more people to see, definitely send them my way!

garyclarke27• 8 years ago

I agree, YouTube search is very poor, I don’t understand why Google video search is so much better. This is OK on iPad since it’s easy to open videos from a browser into the app, but this shortcoming is a real pain on Apple TV, which i use the most for watching video, relaxing in the evening bug screen and glass of red wine (or two).

gnicholas• 8 years ago

I'm curious about how the viewbotting is actually carried out and whether this impacts inline video ads on Youtube. I experimented with these video ads and did some very narrow targeting for our audience (searches related to dyslexia or ADHD). I know that a sizable percentage of people with dyslexia or ADHD love our tools (and our video ad contained a demo), but the click-through rate was next to nothing.

I wondered at the time if this was an issue with how Youtube does their targeting, or if it was something else. Seeing how popular viewbotting is, I now wonder if the bots end up getting categorized as relevant to different types of ads and are subsequently shown them. Of course, this would depress the click-through rate and the overall efficacy of Youtube video advertising.

Would be interested in others' thoughts.

anonymous5133• 8 years ago

I used to do viewbotting back in the day but it isn't as lucrative as you would think. Basically, the creme de la creme is views from residential IP addresses, especially from the United States. Most proxy and VPN IPs are allocated to datacenter IPs so those IPs are easy to detect by youtube.

When you run the viewbotting app all it does is scroll though various youtube videos. Sometimes it likes the video and other times it will add a fake comment. Occasionally it will subscribe to the channel. The software is designed to mimic real user behavior. In exchange for running the bot you get credits which allows other bots to view your video. Since it is residential IP addresses, you do get paid for the views.

The big downside is that there isn't that many people using it so you don't really make much money from it at all. In fact, you are better off just spending your time making quality content.

From what I understand, the services mentioned in the article are not quality views. Youtube will most likely delete those views eventually.

z3t4• 8 years ago

Social proof is so important, even as I am aware of it I still fall for it, for example Github stars and contributors. I kinda feel special when I am watching a youtube video of less then 100 views though.

alexozer• 8 years ago

I'm honestly not sure I can trust anything this author says.

In this article he links to another he's written [0] which posits that Professor Jordan Peterson is recruiting depressed men for the alt-right. It's full of nothing but false emotionally-driven insinuations, and is especially ridiculous considering Peterson's very explicit stance against extremist ideologies on either side, including the alt-right.

[0] https://theoutline.com/post/3537/alt-right-recruiters-have-i...

YouTube’s fake views economy

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