YouTube kills billions of video views faked by Music Industry | Hacker News Reader

YouTube kills billions of video views faked by Music Industry

tomsguide.com

140 pointsdonohoe48 comments

I'm always happy to see that none of you guys participated in this whole fake views fiasco but there are a few things that need to be mentioned about this.

-Earlier this year a flaw was discovered in the mobile section of the site which provided videos through rtsp. Unlike the main desktop version of the site, the mobile section did not record individual IP addresses per view. For example someone could rent a VPS (gigabit connection) and keep hitting the url for the rtsp stream and +1 the view every time. You didn't even have to download/stream the video fully, just send it a GET request.

-Upon discovering this various services such as ViewTornado popped up, the "hack" was only shared by a few people at the time who dominated the "most viewed" section of Youtube for a few week and gained a lot of subscribers, which was the only way to make money [1].

-After the glitch was released on various public blackhat forums everybody had access to it, for a few days there was a lot of disruption with the mobile section of youtube (indirect ddos).

To combat this Youtube has added additional protection. There were also other glitches that affected the desktop version of the website which have now also been patched. Furthermore, if you analyse Youtube http packets you will see that every few seconds it makes a request to the youtube servers while you watch a video. This is done to prevent "botting" and to better evaluate viewer engagement (eg how long the viewer watched the video before closing). Apparently, this statistic now also a vital component in the ranking of the videos.

[1] Contrary to popular HN belief, fake views did not directly generate revenue for the culprits. However, the popularity gained from the fake views (front page features, most viewed today etc) did generate a fair amount of revenue and exposure for the culprits.

Can you please explain how fake views did not generate revenue? I thought that Youtube Partners got paid some CPM for every 1,000 views their video had?

The "mobile views" he mentioned (in quotes because the mobile URLs were being accessed, but not via a mobile device) did not serve any ads.

YouTube doesn't pay creators directly, they cut them a percentage of actual ad revenue. No ads -> no rev for YouTube -> no rev for creators.

Although:

Some Youtube networks (eg: Maker, Machinima, Curse) do pay based on view count, but they're much more likely to be on top of fake views.

I had the assumption that YouTube/Google would have already tracked how much of a video was being watched, or even what segments.

They did but at the time it was not done for mobile views.

Once again, the aggregated (e.g. rewritten) story gets shared.

The original story, with original reporting, is here on the Daily Dot.

http://www.dailydot.com/news/youtube-universal-sony-fake-vie...

I never understand why people don't reward the original hard work. If you appreciate real reporting, reward it.

I'm sure that usually, they have no idea what the "real" story is or how to find it.

Funny that after more than a week this linkbait story hits HN. Original or not ;) In fact those views happened and are still there: They were just tranfered to the Vevo channel. Read more at http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/w...

If everyone flagged blogspam when they saw it, blogspam would disappear.

Because of your comment I flagged the blogspam.

Not everybody can flag. I lost my ability to flag about a year ago (not sure why).

If they broke the terms of service shouldn't they be removed from youtube (like any smaller group would have been). Not just have their views removed? There is no punishment in just removing the views.

110% agree

You can bet their ToS and our ToS are not nearly the same.

Well, 2.3 million views is still a lot, and I think YouTube won't risk dropping those users.

If a video can be deleted for having a lot of fake views, I wonder how much money it would cost to have someone else's video deleted for violating the TOS. I think not deleting for this kind of TOS violation is correct.

You wouldn't steal an upvote.

Nope, but I just gave you one of mine - free digital copy anyway. Highfives cost more.

Screw you, I would if I could. ;)

Oh? I just gave mine to ghurlman.

That. is. hilarious. Google should obviously sue for the lost revenue from those fake 800m views.

Better yet, smaller YouTube partner channels should start a class action for the money they lost due to the music industry illegitimately pushing them out of the way by faking their own popularity. (And no, I don't think either what you said, or what I said would work).

i dont know enough about youtube advertising to know the answer, but do big youtube accounts get paid purely by view numbers, or is it more like adsense where they get paid by clicks?

It actually is AdSense, but AdSense uses both CPM and CPC models, if I am not mistaken. I don't know if both models are used with YouTube videos.

If they do use CPM and Google doesn't shut down their AdSense accounts for inflating their impressions, then there's another example of Google applying a different set of rules with large companies than the ones they apply to ordinary users.

As a businessman I don't understand this. That would only cost Google a lot of money. What they most likely will do is either consider that sum to be a loan and not pay for the next 800m views or have them pay back the money.

The reason they won't do this to average Joe is simply that you don't generate enough income for Google to care about keeping you.

There's actually probably a legitimate case here for a class action lawsuit suing Google on behalf of its advertisers.

Assuming a $5 CPM, this article means Google is admitting to making at least $10 million from advertising to fake impressions.

I'm not sure about that. It seems that the flaw used (described in other comments here) just required to do a GET request on the video stream, not stream it fully. So whether or not fake impressions took place depends on how and when ad impressions are counted. I would think you need to download at least part of the ad for it to count as an impression.

I doubt that Google can be (successfully) sued because some other entity violated the ToS. You'd probably have to show that Google acted maliciously.

Important question: were any of the billion Gangnam Style views faked?

The video still shows over 1B views on its page, so I'm assuming not.

If you go to the shady side of the internet, the one with lots of ads that autoplay, you might see the Gangnam Style video as one of them. I guess they buy the ads as part of their marketing for the song, but I'm not really sure how that works. I've seen other popular songs being auto-played as well. I guess being in the top viewed is important enough that you spend money on it.

If this was some indie youtuber, they would've been banned from advertising revenue as well.

What's worse? Big companies paying services like fiverr to get fake views or Google failing to detect fake views that are trivial enough to be sold @ 5 usd.

5 USD for one view? For that I can pay a guy in the Philippines to actually watch the video.

At 5$ a view, I'll watch your 3 minute long videos all day right here in America.

I think 5 USD could get you more than one actual view.

yea it can easily get you over 12,000 views

Oh come on... 15 seconds of research would have spared us your question:

http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=youtube

A quick scan of the first results shows 7000 views for $5.

For 5 bucks you can buy 2k views [1]

[1] http://fiverr.com/gottapays/provide-you-2000-youtube-views-b...

Are you saying: who's worse, the criminals pick pocketing people or the policeman that fails to catch the criminal?

Did these views actually collect advertising revenue? The article only talks about inflated viewcounts (which would land you on the "trending/top" lists), which is bad, but not nearly as bad as collecting money from advertisers for views that never happened.

It seems like people commenting here think that advertisers were defrauded out of $millions. If that was the case, I think that this deserves much more (main stream) attention.

doubtful. none of the ad tracking pixels/code would fire.

No, they were taking advantage of URLs that would trigger a view count increase but would not play an actual advertisement.

Who are the pirates now?

Seems like it's time to prosecute the companies for fraud for every single instance of the fraud they committed.

The '# views' may be a cosmetic metric. At least at MySpace it was. So when we caught someone trying to inflate views, we ignored the issue. This is because the processes used to measure the impact of media was based on a different set of metrics. Those processes were extremely scrutinized.

Virool's in big trouble.

When I met Virool's founder I grilled him about how they actually get the views people pay for, for obvious reasons. As far as I can tell it's fully legit.

It's probably possible to test this by checking your YouTube analytics and seeing if the view increase came from the embedded player (which it should) or mobile (which might indicate foul play).

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