We have spoken of YouTube videos on this blog a few times in the past week, and today will be another link in the chain. Google is really focusing on their video platform these days, and it’s clear they want to drive more advertisers (and more advertiser dollars) there. They’ve expanded the offering, changed the comments to Google+ where people are less hostile, and added the big video results to search, and now they are making that last crucial step for mass digital marketing success: taking out the garbage.
That’s right, this week Google has announced they are stepping up their security efforts to stop fraudulent views. This is especially important to advertisers because they pay on a view whether it’s real or not.
The biggest problem with these fake views comes from the content creators. They get paid per view by the advertisers (through Google, of course) and to inflate their views, they use a service full of scammers (cough fiverr cough) to but thousands of views for cheap. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, the content creator gets paid and the advertiser gets bubkis (excuse my yiddish).
To combat this, Gioogle is bringing in the big guns. Here’s what Google software engineer Philipp Pfeiffenberger had to say:
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. While in the past we would scan views for spam immediately after they occurred, starting today we will periodically validate the video’s view count, removing fraudulent views as new evidence comes to light. We don’t expect this approach to affect more than a minuscule fraction of videos on YouTube, but we believe it’s crucial to improving the accuracy of view counts and maintaining the trust of our fans and creators.
Will it work? Only time will tell, but here’s hoping it’s at least a better percentage or real to fake than Facebook!