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Comment by Cacti | Hacker News Reader

Re: billions of views:

"Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. "

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That is an important caveat and it's hard to accurately pin down since there is no idea of how many of these views are generated by users or by bots.

For the real view number of billions to be wrong bots need to account for over 90% of the views if we're only considering the two channels the article referenced.

That bot percentage would have to be much higher if you factor in other channels of similar veins. https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed

Though you also have to factor in how many channels are just run of the mill content egg opening content vs more disturbing children's entertainment.

When I worked in newspaper web tech, I did an analysis of our front end traffic, grouped by IP ranges, user agent claims, and so on. I found that the majority of our bandwidth was spiders and bots. The majority of our hits were also robots. I couldn't do anything about that without big spending with our cache vendor to prevent it.

Where are you getting 90% from? There are only a little over 7 billion people on the planet and a little less than half of those have internet connection last I saw. If something got billions of view either the entire internet population watched it, or a smaller group watched it many many times. Sure some things are viral, but what are the odds that they have near 100% penetration or that everyone who sees it just plays it on repeat?

Little Baby Bum 13 billion + Blu Toys Surprise Brinquedos & Juegos 6 billion views = 19 billion views. If 90% of those views are from bots that still leaves about 2 billion views from actual people. Not saying there are billions of people watching these videos. I'm saying that even if the vast majority of the views were from bots that still leaves billions of actual views. I would agree lots of folks would play the videos on repeat. The actual number of folks/children in this sort of video matrix would be even trickier to determine.

My two year old daughter has watched "Let It Go" 12 times so far today and it's only a little after noon. I could very much see the human target audience of this content watching it on repeat.

I have seen them pop up on YouTube and it was the last time I ever let my children use it.

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