This situation is nothing new, its very similar to what happened during the dotcom bubble in the late '90s: back then small startups used a sizable chunk of their funding to run banner ads on popular portals like Yahoo. Some times they received that funding after gaining some notoriety after running some small ads, which prompted them to run even more ads. Because the business plans of most of these startups was a joke there were no revenues and soon they ran out of money. As it turns out it was all a closed-loop, the major dotcom companies like Yahoo received far more money from these startups' ads than from other companies/products, so as soon as the startups died the revenue of major portals took a nosedive and the markets went crazy.
Today there's a huge number of social media companies, some founded by ex-ad industry guys and others by wantrepreneurs, and they make a lot of money "creating" viral videos for their customers. This is very similar to the dotcom scenario: company A pays social media startup B to make a series of viral videos. Because the results of this campaign are measured mostly in terms of views B uses part of the money to inflate the number of views.
The problem as I been saying some colleagues at marketing for years, is that corporate clients are realizing this for the simple fact that viral numbers don't translate in sales or user engagement/loyalty, case in point only 1% of FB users who "Like" a company's page return at some point in the future.
Now that this little fact has made its way to the mainstream media it's only a matter of time until the idea that viral marketing its completely useless becomes ingrained in the public's mind.
This is incredibly true. If I was some type of marketing consultant or whatever, and lets say I was trying to market a band that was paying me (as if bands have money these days), if I could get them 60,000 views in a few days this would seem absolutely huge to the average smaller band. Their assumptions would be that they are getting huge in comparison to their local competition.
It doesn't matter that the views are worthless. Even if they know you 'did something' to make that happen, they'd be happy because other people looking at it would think they are more legitimate for it. Its all about perception. I remember people running various bots and scripts to blow up their MySpace music play counts. "Wow this band has 300k plays? They must be good!". Same could be said for Twitter follower count, etc...
It can all be gamed. The question is how many people realize its been gamed?
Right now it seems that number it's on the rise, so I guess is a matter of how long this line of business will last considering cash-strapped businesses wont spend a dime on something that's widely considered to be useless/ineffective.
You'd think that it would stop working right? Yet, it doesn't seem to. It just moves.
Overall there's a trend toward the value (ROI) of advertising almost always dropping as better data on the ROI becomes widely available. Advertisers try their hardest to show the ad buyers that the ads are being massively effective, and try to hide any statistics that speak to the contrary.
Most advertising isn't effective. Period. Of course, it isn't just the form that's bad, but the message as well so it can't all be blamed on the medium.
New forms of advertising like to pretend that new money is actually being spent by consumers. Surely, there is shift in consumer spending, but it rarely coincides with the growth of a new broadcast media. Just because there's Youtube|Twitter|MySpace doesn't mean more people are buying cars|music|clothing. Yet, brands want to throw money there in hopes that there will be.
Slowly there is a realization that those $10CPM ads were only returning $3CPM of investment. When enough people realize this (it takes a while) the value drops for everyone.
Sometimes it's hard to value the investment for ROI, especially in terms of perception as you mentioned above. The fact is though, social proof is an element of popularity and so people will continue to game social elements like that.
That's just the thing: just like it doesn't really matters if a product IS "the best" but if it's perceived by the population at large as "the best", advertising it's also subject to this kind of rationalization, and if social and viral ads become increasingly perceived as ineffective, a waste of money or worst, a scam, then it's over, since even if certain techniques are put forward to improve it and solve the inherent problems in the system, these ads will still be considered by many higher-ups to be useless.
This is allowed to happen precisely because advertisers have been conditioned on 30-odd years of broadcast TV advertising, back when that was the only mass-media game in town. The strategy on broadcast TV, whether in its heyday or even now, was essentially the shotgun approach: fire a shotgun into a crowded area, and hope to hit a small percentage of your targets (metaphorically speaking, of course!).
Web-based advertising can, potentially, allow for a much more sophisticated and surgical approach. But advertisers aren't used to thinking surgically. They still want their shotgun. (They call the shotgun "reach," or use terms like "GRPs" to attempt to quantify reach). That's why broad, sloppy metrics like total video views, or total pageviews, or total clicks, still appeal to advertisers. They're still working from the mental model that you need to fire a big spray of shot, and that you apply some sort of fractional discount to the total number of people you fired at, and that fraction is who you managed to get. It's a dumb, top-down, unsophisticated approach to advertising -- but it persists, and so long as it does, there will remain a healthy market for "viral" services.
You have to watch out, a lot of websites out there that sell views are really just resellers. You have to find the site that is provided to all of them...From what I hear, youtube has been cracking down on their methods pretty well, but the black hatters always evolve and prevail, at least in the short term.
It is quite possible (I would even say likely) that they still run on bots mostly but buy a couple of ads here and there to make it look like they are sending you legitimate traffic. I am sure the LA times are not the only ones to figure out that you google things to see where your video is being promoted.
If these services actually relied on ads and real people, then they are doing some amazing work. Getting 20K people to click on a video for $46 is amazing given current CPC rates.
"Getting 20K people to click on a video for $46 is amazing given current CPC rates."
Getting 20K first world people interested enough to click might be amazing but watching a few thousand of these a day at those rates might make minimum wage in say Ulan Bator.
Mongolian minimum wage ~ $4 a day
1/20,000 of $46 is .23 cents
That's ~1,600 vids a day but a worker would prolly see less then a third of the total so let's say 5k videos a day. Prolly counts as a view as soon as you watch a second or two though -- you'd need 10 vids a minute to maintain 5k a day.
Meh, a "Mongolian Turk" horde seems possible but bots seem far more likely and attractive as you say.
It seems it would be pretty easy to just 'rent' computers to do this. Even better if they are in the united states. It's essentially software that notices when you are idle and opens up Youtube videos, and other web media to inflate viewership.
Maybe you even share the profits with the computer owner.
Is there not analytics available for youtube videos? I would be suspicious if 90% of my views were from Mongolia (or more likely, China) after a campaign like this.
While the viewing stats would be really interesting to see, it would seem to indicate that you could potentially just use Facebook's ads yourself to do this cheaper. However, I've had little success myself getting 5 cent clicks on Facebook.
You mean getting a click for 5 cents? I got a 100% success on 10 cents during a test. Apparently, from the results most of the clickers came from India.
Ah, I should have clarified. When I fixed the ads to my demographics (people who like competing brands/products, US (because that is where our product is available)) then mine went up to .60 sometimes.
If you want a free resource for views that are semi-real, just use vagex.com it is basically a traffic exchange. You download a viewer and run it and generate credits which you can then use to purchase views for your video.
I think I heard you can get 10,000 Facebook followers for about $100 just a few days ago. These sort of tactics are nothing new. But they are usually pretty worthless. You need to have some kind of relationship with your followers - not to be a spammer to a large list of them.
View inflation can create the illusion of popularity which can be incredibly vital for lots of purposes, e.g. convincing investors, building hype, etc.
A lot of book publishers now use facebook likes as a way of determining whether to buy manuscripts from specific authors--which is ridiculous because of things like fivver. I've studied this stuff for a while--I'm a bit dubious in that regard-- to see how such things can be exploited for benefit and it's a tremendous span--so many industries are trying to be web savvy and latching onto things like likes and views, and favourites--but all of these are as demonstrated in this post are fairly easily exploitable.
I am not sure why HN fails understand the value of youtube video views.
It is more like (ok, not exactly) getting your startup promoted on Techcrunch. If your startup has some material, then this exposure can get you go places. But if your startup is crappy, it will not matter whether you get on their front page or not, your startup will fail.
The inflated video views gives an initial kick start for your video becoming viral. If you have a reasonably good video that could grab some attention, this will give it a fast push to being viral.
There are sites out there that picks the popular videos. Even you tube will get you on the trending video. Once the avalanche starts, it will just get going.
But if the video is crappy, the initial views will be all that you can get for your video.
There is no way those views are coming from Facebook, the traffic is too expensive based on the rates they are charging.
The view companies are just faking the refferer. This is a common technique in internet marketinn. I used to sell clients views services like that, and I've helped videos go viral by ordering from multiple sources and getting over 100,000 views in less than 72 hours, propelling the videos to the front page. This results in the videos actually getting real organic views way beyond what was "fake."
That's possible as well, but they still would have had to drive traffic to those pages, and again, ads would be too expensive. I had a client who requested that the people be real, and so instead of bot views that normal providers used, I found another guy. Apparently the people were tricked into watching the video with a clickjack from a pr0n website.
What is unethical about that? The video was going to get views anyway, I was just helping it out. It's like the snowball effect that would occur naturally, except they start with a bigger snowball. I don't do this stuff anymore though, that was when I was younger and in college.
I'm not saying you're a bad person. Hell, I've done plenty of unethical stuff in my time. But generating fraudulent views is a clear abuse of the system. You're simply rationalising it away.
Your assumption is that a 'clear abuse of the system' is unethical. Overflowing a char buffer to get control of EIP is also a 'clear abuse of the system', yet I have a hard time qualifying that (by itself) as unethical.
Is this to juke the stats to make a video seem more popular than it is? If you divide that out it's about $0.05 per 20 views. I think you could ask somebody on Mechanical Turk to open 20 browser tabs and let them sit for 2 minutes with bids of about a nickel.
Youtube promotes trending videos, so if you get a lot of views very quickly, particularly among a common demographic, then the video will be more heavily promoted, and is more likely to go viral.
Similarly, videos with lots of view tend to appear higher in search results.
I imagine that people at youtube are very aware of this, and put an effort into distinguishing ``real'' view (consistent demographic/trusted referer) and ``fake'' (spammy/ black hat SEO) views.
Even at $0.01 a HIT, that's $200 for 20,000 views.
I used a "traffic generation" service once (note once) and it seemed to operate through pop-unders/iframes on various third-rate sites with high traffic volume (MP3 download sites, celebrity news, etc).
Bounce rate was close to 100% and conversion was 0, but it made the hit count shoot off the chart. Interestingly, a lot of the hits never registered on Google Analytics but showed up on the web server logs. They appeared to be legitimate traffic (different IPs, user agents, etc).
It's possible lots of people are quick at closing pop-up/under windows.
I think I generally am quick enough to close a pop-up before the page has loaded, which sometimes/often would mean the Google Analytics script hasn't loaded (depending on how Analytics was setup - the new async loaded at the top of the page would probably have caught me, the older syncronous one at the end of the page would probably have missed me).
Today there's a huge number of social media companies, some founded by ex-ad industry guys and others by wantrepreneurs, and they make a lot of money "creating" viral videos for their customers. This is very similar to the dotcom scenario: company A pays social media startup B to make a series of viral videos. Because the results of this campaign are measured mostly in terms of views B uses part of the money to inflate the number of views.
The problem as I been saying some colleagues at marketing for years, is that corporate clients are realizing this for the simple fact that viral numbers don't translate in sales or user engagement/loyalty, case in point only 1% of FB users who "Like" a company's page return at some point in the future.
Now that this little fact has made its way to the mainstream media it's only a matter of time until the idea that viral marketing its completely useless becomes ingrained in the public's mind.
Once that happens there's no way back.