[24255] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Want inflated YouTube view counts? You got 'em!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Mon Aug 17 16:27:15 2026
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:17:47 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
Message-ID: <20260817201747.GA6813@vortex.com>
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Want inflated YouTube view counts? You got 'em!
Google has never publicly disclosed the details of exactly what is a
counted "view" on YouTube, but it has long been publicly surmised that
a very short view is not counted. This has avoided various issues that
could easily trigger view inflation counting users (and robots) that
actually didn't engage with the video at all.
But hey, since YouTube competitors tend to count a view from the very
instant a video starts playing, YouTube will be joining the crowd and
bumping up the view count as soon as the video starts. Yep, the public
view count will be the newly inflated count. Apparently creators will
still be able to see an "engaged" view count on their video
dashboards, but this will not be publicly visible.
So is this whole thing a good idea? NOPE. But it's following Google's trend
away from quality more deeply into the "a click is a click" model that
is wrecking YouTube quality throughout its fabric (especially with that
mass piracy promotion system that YouTube calls "Shorts").
Well, not a surprise anyway.
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
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Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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