Some of YouTube’s more popular producers of original videos are quietly reporting their viewership numbers have suddenly dropped. The problem isn’t that viewer habits are changing. We’re still in love with cute kittens and people in pain. The problem is click fraud and online video producers are finally getting busted for it.
I was told last week that least some of the numbers generated by more than a few YouTube video makers who deliver hundreds of thousands of views on a regular basis come from banks of servers and zombie PCs pretending to surf. Such click fraud was a huge issue a few years ago for the Google search engine, but YouTube has separate management, remember, and maybe has different values, too. Ever bigger numbers approaching a billion total views per day have been part of the YouTube mystique, so looking the other way may have been part of the YouTube M.O., not that advertisers will be cheered.
I remember in the late 1990s Microsoft honcho Steve Ballmer telling me how Redmond wanted back then to be the most pirated software company. Though I’m sure he wouldn’t say that today as CEO, Ballmer’s logic was clear: piracy is free distribution with zero support costs and once a country can be made to enforce copyright laws huge bucks almost instantly follow as penalties are paid. So too, YouTube benefited from click fraud by showing huge numbers that discouraged competitors and attracted advertisers, even though advertisers were actually getting less for their money.
But now it appears that YouTube is ready to grow up. Pumping Google’s own cash into professional content for the first time, the company may no longer be willing to tolerate video click fraud since it would be stealing from itself.
Some producers report views per-video that are down as much as 90 percent. All it takes is for YouTube to apply a filter that rejects clicks coming too fast from the same IP or MAC address. No citations are issued, just an algorithmic reduction of numbers. And no producer fights it because, of course, they are in the wrong to do so.
Yet many successful YouTube producers who do this trick mistakenly think it isn’t against the rules or even wrong to do.
Kids.
So the YouTube ecosystem is in flux. It will be interesting to see how YouTube changes in coming months as producers, if they are to remain in business, have to get viewers the old fashioned way, by earning them.
Guesst I’ll have to cross that scheme off my get-rich-quick list.
Oh well, back to infomercials for me.
It’s exactly as you say here Mr. Cringely, YouTube has to suppress fraud to gain the new type of validity it seeks as a “real” content source. The Internet, without click fraud is the way of the world vis-a-vis accountable advertising. If we want mushy numbers we look to Neilson in the broadcast world…
Video on the web is the next big thing and Social TV is the current favorite flavor. Just look at all the money that’s flowing into the second-screen social TV space and the activity that’s firing up in single-screen social TV shows on Facebook (just one example space)
Disintermediation continues. Old business models evolve or die and opportunity abounds for those willing to take the leap. I’m excited by what’s happening and making a move… are you?
*cough*
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…
It means “the elimination of an intermediary in a transaction between two parties”. In other words, content producers can sell directly to content consumers. What do you think it means?
what’s their alternative? go to another site that allows the fake click action so their numbers stay up?
i’m sure advertisers don’t like paying for phantoms either.
Is it possible that advertisers knew/suspected all along that this was going on? If so, is it going to be business as usual, with the possibility that ad rates per click will go up? I suspect the answer is yes to all of these questions, but I’m no insider.
This is going to make a lot of server farm operators in China and India very angry! 🙂
Those chaps thought they had a good thing going, riding the gravy train. Looks like the blokes are going to have to start earning their keep instead of being parasites on the western economies.
It used to be when I traveled in the U.S., China was perceived as a bit of a puzzle, and India was resented by a large segment of society, from call centers to engineering shops who were forced (figuratively) at gunpoint to train their replacements. But now I see even stronger anti-India, anti-China sentiment in Europe, than I ever saw in the states.
Also, China may not know it yet, but as their wealth grows, Microsoft is watching. The free ride will end at some point. The alternative would be a spike in piracy in the west – Microsoft has admitted (literally) that they price things so cheaply in China is because it’s better to get “something” than “nothing at all”. Mr. Ballmer, I’d like to introduce you to something called “The Law of Unintended Consequences”.
Westerners will realize that not only is piracy (in the far east) not punished – it’s actually rewarded by lowering prices. So why shouldn’t a westerner pirate? He either gets it for free, or he forces the hand of a price reduction. Sounds like a win-win. (Of course, moral issues aside – that clearly hasn’t been a problem in China.)
If Microsoft argues that “We charge more in the west because salaries / quality of living / etc.are higher in the west”. Well, that ship sails both ways. My brilliant brother in law in Ireland can’t get a job because most technical work is sent to India now. So that drives salaries down. So that reduces westerners ability to pay big sums for MSOFT products (or Apple, or …)
So either keep the damn work in the home country, support salaries & enable people to buy your products, or sell them down the river, reduce the quality of their lives, and watch them pirate Windows 8, buy used iPads & iPods instead of new ones, spend less at the iTunes store & buy an HTC or Samsung phone instead of an Apple.
MSOFT and APPL, the very reason you use to justify outsourcing (we can’t afford to pay these westerners so much!) is the same reason the west buys the majority of your products.
The.Law.Of.Unitended.Consequences. Remember it.
They can just do mandatory teenage internships at Foxconn.
Damm that capitalism!!! It was so good when us westerners were exploiting (as its supposed to be) those asians. After all there are so many of them. Now they are eating our lunch, how dare they!
Yeah.
I like YouTube. I find my favorite stuff not from actual YouTube searches, but from the links sent to me by my friends. For me the YouTube search tools don’t work well. The results are often heavily biased by all the false click counts. I can’t find stuff I like. Without the word of month YouTube would be almost useless to me.
This change could be very good for YouTube. It could make the service better. It could make it easier for one to find the GOOD content. That would be a very welcome improvement.
Good. Now if only Google would do something about the massive number of YouTube videos that are themselves click fraud. Fake TV episodes are the new phishing lure–especially obvious when they purport to be episodes that haven’t even aired yet. Finding what I really want is usually more trouble than it’s worth, and the problem is only getting worse.
The ones that ask you to “visit my website,” if I’m not making myself clear.
Doesn’t surprise me.
I got a cheque from Google for $100!
I was surprised to find out I had 100,000 views of a couple home videos I shot on my digital video cam. Not “viral” but quite respectable.
Could you imagine, pre-internet I mean, shooting an amateur home video and getting 100,000 strangers who wanted to watch it based solely on the title you gave it and a single frame from the video? And earning a cool $100 in the bargain?
And I think I’m halfway to the second $100 cheque already!
What’s the link? I’ll give ya few clicks!
twizelve suckaaaaas!
I always wondered about that. What’s to stop any entity (or even the person that put the video up on YouTube) from generating automatic clicks to that particular video and taking Google’s money.
They started this stuff, make ’em pay! Heck, I JUST MIGHT DO THAT MYSELF!!!
And wouldn’t chuck testa make a lot more money if he did taxadermize pets?
What’s even more interesting is that outside the top 20 earners on YouTube (prior to this) – no on is making more than 70K a year off producing content there.
So if any of the top 20 (annoying orange and so on) are seeing their traffic drop – it suggests that your chances of actually making even a minimum wage living off producing content for youtube are slim to non-existent.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. In YouTube’s new professional content initiative it looks like the payback is about 400,000 views. Until you get to 400K Google gets all the money. After 400K they still get 30 percent I think. How many videos per day are destined to eventually reach 400K? Maybe 20-30 out of 10,000 or so? Some people will make money but most people won’t.
Either way for me doesn’t matter, and I’m a full time professional Youtuber.
Because most of my revenue comes from direct advertising and sponsorship on my own web site and community forum, and not the Youtube Ads.
I only get 10K views per video, and 4 million total over 240+ videos, so I’m small fry in the Youtube world, but I’m still able to make a comfortable full time living from it. Why? Because I simply use Youtube as my video hosting and distribution medium, and not as my sole ad revenue stream as most professional Youtubers do.
I also use it for the search capability, getting 8000+ views per day on existing videos without uploading any new content. That ultimately draws people into my brand and my blog site. After all, Youtube is the worlds second largest search engine behind Google, or so they claim.
Dave.
Well most video is not worth much. There was a cartel in Hollywood for some time. At some point they go the way of the goony. Only so many times you can recycle a plot.
Interesting that this post happens on YouTube’s seventh anniversary today.
There’s kismet for you!
Busted!
Well so be it, its high times for the values of new media to rise to the potential of new media.
> All it takes is for YouTube to apply a filter that rejects clicks coming too fast from the same IP or MAC address.
Surely not MAC address though? Unless you’re suggesting that someone on YouTube’s local ethernet is hammering the servers?
Yeah, my thoughts exactly – YouTube doesn’t see the viewer’s computer’s MAC address… unless Adobe Flash collects it and sends it to them?
Do advertisers really care about click fraud?
Fraud drives their click-throughs up, but their conversion rate goes way down to compensate, which means lower ad rates.
No fraud would mean fewer clicks, but make more sales per click – Google would simply put ad rates up as each click was higher quality.
It’s content producers who should care, as the click-fraudsters are skimming money that would otherwise go to them.
If the advertisers are paying YouTube per click, then having a lot of false clicks means a ton of wasted money.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that this is happening right now in order to sabotage Facebook’s IPO. Facebook is a completely different business to Youtube, but it also relies on clicked advertising and this story therefore puts their revenue source under suspicion.
I think you may be on to something…. if th whole “pay-per-click” revenue model isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, that would inplode the Facebook IPO bigtime
Inflated click numbers also increase the probability that a video will be reported on by the popular press: “Hey, look at this video going viral, it has xxx,xxx hits!”, which in turn fuels the cycle.
It’s a feeding frenzy. The phony clicks lead to more media coverage, more visibility, which leads to even more clicks. This change needs to happen soon.
We’ve been seeing this issue as well – but for a completely different reason – my company publishes some of our marketing information videos in YouTube – lately, we’ve seen a huge decrease in reported views when we know thousands of our employees have viewed those videos. Since our Internet gateway proxies all our employees through a single address, it treated as fraudulent traffic instead of legitimate visits by distinct people.
Now, we’ll have to create a completely different way to track actual views.
FPSRussia: looking back at total views versus time-since-posted, the total views generally reach the same peak … and if it was about a Glock, it’s higher … which makes sense.
DrinkingWithBob: two orders of magnitude lower for total views, but same trend (except no Glocks, just stupid President tricks to rant about).
communitychannel: Natilie Tran always rocketed up over 1 million in a couple of days-to-a-week and then leveled off below 2 million. It’s a shame she has basically taken the monitized-channel money and is doing something else with her life.
My channel … gosh, now I know the truth of why after almost three years, I only have 814 subscribers after posting 434 fishing videos for a grand total of 399,888 Upload Views.
That’s it! I HAVE NO ZOMBIE HELPERS! (I shudda ‘no-en!)
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Click fraud notwithstanding, the current view count is flawed. I’ve inadvertantly added dozens of views just by editing videos. A view is counted when you just see a few seconds and decide to move on. IMO, they should count a view only when a viewer has seen the entire fucking thing!
Now my crufty kitten videos will stand a chance… Yay!!
*…begins rounding up the cats for a video session…*
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[…] to generate millions of illegal clicks. I wrote a few months ago how longtime YouTubers were suffering income drops as Google algorithmically eliminated their botnet clicks. But click fraud requires a third party ad […]
[…] to generate millions of illegal clicks. I wrote a few months ago how longtime YouTubers were suffering income drops as Google algorithmically eliminated their botnet clicks. But click fraud requires a third-party […]
[…] to generate millions of illegal clicks. I wrote a few months ago how longtime YouTubers were suffering income drops as Google algorithmically eliminated their botnet clicks. But click fraud requires a third party […]