Rabbit Muckrakers
By Tim.The tools of the web scale so easily to allow interaction and communication on a mass scale, and that’s why we love ‘em, but the flip side is always how these automated systems can be twisted to other ends. As soon as a system gets enough use to be important, someone’s trying to game it. We’ve seen this of course with the millions of robot blogs that are gaming Google AdSense and Technorati on a mass scale; with astroturf video postings on YouTube; and with the horrible plague of blog comment spam (as I logged in to post this, I did my daily scrubbing of the dozen or so soulless spam posts that had accumulated overnight, some caught by WordPress’ filters, others not).
Intrepid rabbit videbloggers buns and chou chou (check out their show, Rabbit Bites) recently blew the lid off a story about possible manipulation by YouTube users of viewing statistics, which I’m only getting to read up on now. The way it works is something like this: you repeatedly refresh your video’s page, either manually or with an automated script, enough to get it into the “most viewed today” section for a category, where it’s easier for a video to then take off, based on the tendency of the community to trust that the video got there on its own merits and is worth checking out. In a preliminary test they were able to somewhat duplicate the result, a feat that’s more remarkable considering their lack of opposable thumbs.
As their accusation reverberates through the blogosphere (Mashable did a very detailed followup in October) perhaps we’ll see some light shed on this practice and how widespread it may or not be… and whether the YouTube community will naturally evolve to inoculate itself against such cynical gaming. I’ve seen a number of “most viewed” videos lately where the average rating was heading straight down and comments were largely negative… which seems like the beginnings of something, though I’m not sure what it is.
Sometimes, you want to watch the bad thing everyone’s watching as much as the good thing, especially when the action’s in the comments thread, anyway. This is nothing new to the internet: think 90210, or Melrose Place. But in the long term, no one’s going to build something valuable in YouTube when nobody else really likes it.
February 16th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
There are a bunch of problems with the believability of YouTube stats. One of those is the fact that the videos are on auto-play, which means that if you watch the video, follow a link then click ‘back’, that video ends up getting two hits when you don’t actually watch it the second time. You may not have watched it the first time. The way their sidebar menus are set up, they change if you follow a link, so the easiest way to get to a different video you want to see is to go back so it resets the menu to what you had before.
Another problem is it doesn’t track unique visitors. You can visit your own video 1,000 times and nobody will know the difference between that and a video that 1,000 people visited once each.
Another problem is that YouTube “features” videos. When a video is featured, it’s more likely that people are going to check it out. There’s been a lot of hubbub about exactly HOW people’s videos are chosen to be featured…..
Another problem is that it’s YouTube culture to watch videos that you intend to demean, and then demean them. There’s no distinction between hits from fans and hits from ‘haters’. Also, posting a video reply to an already popular video is going to get you automatic hits out of curiousity, which is ZERO indication of your ability to cultivate or maintain an audience on your own.
etc etc etc… Anyway… YouTube is an example of what happens when you toss around a ping-pong ball in a small room. It keeps coming back. The number of “views” that a video has is way less important than the reasons why, and IMO shouldn’t be used as an indicator of either popularity or talent. Perhaps the number of subscribers could be an indication of popularity, but the question is “does that translate to the world outside YouTube?”