In an attempt to crackdown “fraudulent views” and keep a check on artificially inflated view counts, YouTube has announced its plans to audit video views stats on its website.
The new system will help stop inflated video counts in perceived popularity, said YouTube.
The Google owned company claimed that people use various software to ‘buy’ views and these programmes cost as little as $50 (£30) for 60,000 fake views.
Philipp Pfeiffenberger, a Software engineer at YouTube, in a blog post said “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.”
Pfeiffenberger said that they will make it a practice to “periodically validate the video’s view count,” and as new evidence emerge they will remove fraudulent views. YouTube doesn’t expect a huge number of videos to be affected by this move, but claims that this move is important to ensure trust of its fans and video creators.
More than two billion fake video views were wiped off by Youtube in December 2012, that too videos from major record company websites, which affected some of the industry’s biggest names.
Beyond the trust factor, analysts are of the opinion that Google wants to ensure that advertisers stay put with the biggest online video sharing site and that could be the primary reason behind its new found strictness.
