brent gg's Bookmarks tagged promotion →  View Popular

I complained over the weekend that YouTube is increasingly being gamed by users. I decided to test out how hard this would be - as it turns out, it’s exceptionally easy to rank among the most viewed videos and channels by simply refreshing the page. This widespread gaming might also throw into question YouTube’s claim of serving 100 million videos per day.

On Saturday night, I grabbed a video called “Sheep” from the Most Recent list and re-uploaded it under the username “themusichall”. I realized that I’d lost the audio in the process (converted it to the wrong format), but decided to leave it like that - nobody would voluntarily share a 7 second clip with no audio. I then set the page to refresh itself over Sunday night and - sure enough - it was among the most viewed clips this morning. Admittedly, 10,000 or so views doesn’t get you to the top - it’s on the 3rd “Most Viewed” page and ranks 10th in the Comedy category. But this is one computer refreshing one page with fairly long time intervals: I’m not going to make any suggestions that would encourage you to screw it up even more, but it’s pretty obvious how you could attain the number one spot.

There are a plenty of top users who are obviously employing this tactic: did this guy become one of the most viewed videos today because his four second clip about North Korea is so compelling? (Update: that video is no longer showing up in the Most Viewed list, but he’s trying the same tactic with this one). This is the same guy who garnered almost 200,000 views for WoW is Evil - a four second clip in which nothing happens. If you look at his account, he’s watched 299,221 videos this year - about 68 videos an hour if you assume a 12 hour day and 7 days a week spent on YouTube. That’s possible, but it’s far more likely that he forgot to log out of his account on one occasion. What’s more worrying is that enough people complained in the comments to make the video rise to the top of the “Most Discussed” list, too.

Meanwhile, gizmozCOM has viewed 39,083 videos over the past month - around 58 per hour if he stays awake for 24 hours per day. Incidentally, he also has the 22nd most viewed channel this week. Or how about lamo1234, who has personally watched 1,052,747 videos over the past six months - more than 243 an hour during a 24 hour day? Also note that these are only people who forgot to log out of their accounts before refreshing the page - most of the cheaters would remember to do that.

And view counts are just one of the metrics that are being gamed: this junk is making it to the other sections, too. Just logging IP addresses would probably kill off the worst of it. But with the top YouTube stars getting copious amounts of press coverage and deals with the likes of NBC, it seemed inevitable that these problems would arise.

PS. There is no new information here: these problems have been known for a while and documented by the RabbitBites blog, which I give major props to for this post and encourage you to check out. They’ve also documented ratings abuse and other tactics, and received a mention on Mark Cuban’s blog. As a result, I’m surprised that these issues don’t get more attention