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Ways to spot fake youtube views

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you tube views likes buy

If you poke around the microjob website Fiverr.com you’ll discover that you can have thousands and thousands of “views” delivered to the youtube video of your choosing for just a few bucks.  But don’t get excited; you can’t just buy youtube super stardom.  When you order one of these gigs you’re actually buying hits that are disguised to look like views.  So 15,000 real people will NOT be watching your video.  Your view count is simply going to get inflated by 15,000.  Some of these bogus views are generated by bots but in many cases hackers will secretly embed a video on a popular web page.  Every time someone accesses that page the video automatically plays….albeit silently and invisibly.

 

Fake views are really starting to have a big impact on the way youtube works.  Google’s adsense program is getting scammed out of lots of money and lame, wannabe Internet stars are wrecking the site’s integrity by purchasing phoney viral success.  It seems like the folks at youtube are finally fed up and they’re now cracking down on users who buy fake views.  A few weeks ago youtube actually removed more than 2 billion fake views from lots of big name companies and they even shut down the channels of some of the more egregious offenders.

 

It’s easy for youtube’s engineers to spot fake views since they can see data that the general public doesn’t have access to.  But what about the rest of us?  A lot of video contests use youtube views as part of an entry’s score.  How can you tell if a contestant is cheating by ordering fake views?

 

Unfortunately you can’t….at least not for sure.  But these scammers leave a lot of clues so it’s easy to spot views that are probably fake.  Let’s take a look at a youtube video from a channel that hosts close to 300 self-help/get rich quick videos.  It’s is run by some dude who wants to teach you how to apply martial arts lessons to the world of real estate….or something like that.  Yes I’m being serious.

WOWEE!  2.1 million youtube views!  That guy is gonna be the next PSY!  Or maybe not.  Maybe he’s a con artist who bought millions of fake buy youtube views because he wants to make it look like he’s popular so that suckers buy his book or send him donations.  I’m not saying that’s the case….I’m just saying MAYBE that’s what’s happening here.  Why do I think that some of those 2.1 million views might be fake?  Here’s a quick run down of all the red flags I see in this screenshot:

 

1.  The view count is suspiciously high:  You should always be suspicious when you come across a video that has an inexplicably high view count.  Regular youtube users understand what types of videos get a lot of views and this particular video just doesn’t feel like it should be popular.  Would 2.1 million people really watch a 9 minute long get-rich-quick video?

 

2.  The channel has a relatively low number of subscribers:  10,994 subscribers might sound like a lot but that’s a ridiculously small number for anyone who is getting hundreds of thousands or even millions of views on most of their videos.  Here, check out the stats for a GOOD youtube channel; The Final Cut King.  The FCK (heh) gets about a million views for each of his videos.  But unlike the real estate guy he has more than 220,000 subscribers.  Those are numbers that actually make sense.

 

3.  The video only has 2,254 likes:  Guess what?  You can buy likes and comments on fiverr too.  But those are way more expensive than views.  So people who buy fake views sometimes don’t even bother ordering fake likes and comments.  Consequently the stats for those videos are totally lopsided.  It’s just not realistic that only 1/10th of 1% of the people who watch a youtube video will click the thumbs up or thumbs down button.

 

4.  The video only has 20 dislikes:  Few scammers are going to be smart enough to order DISLIKES.  Two million views and only 20 dislikes just scream fraud to me.  If millions of people had actually watched this video a few thousand of them would have clicked the thumbs-down button.  That’s just how things work on youtube.

 

4.  The video only has 489 comments:  This number also doesn’t jive with the view count.  Once again, let’s use the Final Cut King as an example.  Here’s one of his videos that has received 2.5 million views.  It has close to 6,000 comments (and over 30,000 likes/dislikes.)  Comments are REALLY hard to fake since each comment needs to come from a different account and the comments need to be spread out over days and weeks to look realistic.

 

So the basic stats here seem pretty fishy.  Let’s drill down a little deeper into this video’s data to see what else we can discover.  If you look under a video’s view count you’ll see some symbols.  If you click that symbol that looks like a bar graph a bunch extra stats will pop up.

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Jimms Hilson

Saved by Jimms Hilson

on Dec 22, 13