The presence you command on the internet can usually be summed up in a few numbers, the number of followers you have on Twitter, number of likes your business’s page has on Facebook and the number of views your videos have on YouTube, there are just a few examples of how numbers shape the opinion of a stranger on the internet that comes across any one of your many online profiles. Its no secret that there’s a huge market that lets people artificially inflate the numbers in order to make other people think that they’re popular online, you can easily buy followers, YouTube views, Facebook fans and even traffic for your website. Google has been working for quite some time to stop, and now the company has detailed its plans to crackdown against what it says are “fraudulent views” on YouTube videos.
YouTube software engineer Philipp Pfeiffenberger writes in a blog post that the company will now periodically validate a video’s view count, removing fake views when evidence comes to light. Previously videos views used to be scanned for spam immediately after it had occurred, Google now believes that this new method will be crucial in improving accuracy of video counts and “maintaining the trust of our fans and creators.” The obvious motivation here is to stop fans from being mislead by artificial view counts, as well as making YouTube more appealing to advertisers who’d probably want to have the peace of mind that the ads they ran were in fact seen by real people. This new method won’t put an end to view count spamming in its entirely, Google doesn’t expect it to affect “more than a minuscule fraction of videos on YouTube.”