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YouTube crack down leads to billions of video views wiped
Friday 28th December 2012 | Annalisa
The world's biggest record companies have been wiped of billions of views after Youtube crack down on fake view numbers.
Youtube have implemented a crackdown on fake views after conducting an investigation to try and cut down 'black hat' view count building techniques. 'Black hat' is the term for when hackers manipulate the statistics to build up the numbers of views or likes on a video. The aim is to make the video look more popular, increase it's visibility across YouTube and increase the chance of the video going viral.
The crackdown hit the major recrod labels particularly hard with Universal losing a total of 1 billion views and being reducaed to showing only 5 videos on their channel and Sony losing over 850 million views and left with only 3 videos on their channel.
YouTube have recently made changes to the ways they count the views on videos. They have recently announced the change that the views on any video that is no longer live or 'listed' no longer count to towards the total view count. Record labels blame the recent changes for their loss in total views claiming that the views of the videos hosted on VEVO that have been watched on YouTube have been stripped.
'Black hat' techniques are without doubt, used on YouTube, with forums widely available online discussing techniques and the services in general.
I'll leave you to decide whether the record companies hold blame here...
