Google accused of fake views on YouTube

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Search engine giant Google has been accused of charging Adwords advertisers for clicks on YouTube despite the fact that its own systems have identified the view as a bot. The study was conducted by a group of European researchers as an experiment in which they uploaded videos to YouTube and then bought the YouTube adverts to target the videos.

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It was noticed that the bots views two of the videos 150 times while YouTube’s public listed just 24 views after correctly identifying the rest as fake. The experiment was named ‘Understanding the detection of fake view fraud in Video Content Portals which was conducted by a group of Europeans who evaluated the performance of the fake view detection systems of some of the five major online video portals.
The researchers wrote, “YouTube uses a seemingly permissive detection mechanism to discount fake monetised views”. The authors of the reports used software that runs automated tasks over the internet to view the videos. It was also found that YouTube’s detection system has significantly outperformed all the other portals and that it might still be vulnerable to cimple attacks.
The report concluded that the detection mechanisms that were deployed by the video hosting portals were complicated.

Photo Credits: dailydot