2 Billion fake views purged from Record Labels’ YouTube Channels

Waking-Dreams

[url] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/fake-youtube-views-cut-google-audit_n_2380848.html[/url]

Anyone hear about this? No surprise at all. I suppose this is just another form of Payola but it just goes to show even those with all the publicity muscle that indie artists would die for still resort to deception.

I remember back in the days of MySpace when certain bands (plenty of unsigned acts) were guilty of tweaking the stats but it looks like Google are on the ball here.

Savman

Record Company execs in dishonesty shocker!

It's rampant ffs.

Waking-Dreams

Funny thing is that there are plenty of indie acts out there guilty of the same kind of thing. It reminds me of those cheeky contestants you sometimes see on Come Dine With Me that have a professional chef prepare their meal for them.

copacetic

There have been a number of reports since saying these stories are false and just made up. The views dissapeared when the labels pulled the videos that had the views from YouTube and moved them to Vevo.

Waking-Dreams

I’m pretty sure no matter how many videos you take down the number of video views do not just disappear. I know this because before deleting my own YouTube account it read as having 5,000+ video views long after I wiped all the videos from it, months prior to deletion and the video views stayed at 5,000+ the entire time. I think the record companies involved are trying to say that it’s housekeeping but could you blame them with that kind of egg on their face?

These guys here make a good point about how a lot of record labels have a history of inflating their popularity, which if anyone remembers when the RIAA were shouting about billion-dollar loses solely because of illegal downloading, a lot of it turned out to be based on astronomical figures pulled out of thin air. For instance, the high volume sales of CD the industry enjoyed were in large part due to many fans replacing their old vinyl record collections but eventually there were be no younger generation to come up and replace them. It’s a topic for another day but downloading is just one aspect to dwindling sales.

Flesh Gorden

Seems to be common enough on Twitter and Facebook too where you can purchase followers/likes from fake accounts.
I'm not surprised that this has come to light