YouTube seems to be the perfect advertising platform. Videos are highly engaging and the company provides real-time statistics for convenient brand monitoring. Unfortunately, the Google-owned site might just have a glitch.
Latest experiment by European researchers led to a conclusion that while YouTube does not display most of the fake views earned by the videos, the site still charges advertisers for the views.
Experts from NEC Labs Europe, UC3M , Imdea and Polito worked together to evaluate the fake view detection systems of five video sharing websites, including YouTube.
Interestingly, the Google-owned video platform carries out two separate counts of video views. The public view count determines how many times the video has been seen and is displayed publicly. The monetized view count determines the viewership for the purposes of calculating advertising charges.
The researchers uploaded videos, bought ads using Google AdWords and set up a series of bots to target fake views. In one test, the team's bots generated 150 fake views to targeted videos. In two instances, YouTube's public view counter listed 25 views, but Google AdWords charged the researchers for 91.
This means that some views identified as fake by the counter were still charged to advertisers, a fact that would discourage brands from investing on YouTube.
"YouTube uses a seemingly permissive detection mechanism to discount fake monetized views," wrote [pdf] the researchers.
The experts claim that YouTube exposes its advertisers to the risk of building their advertisement campaigns on unreliable statistics. The incident calls for a more transparent analytics, said the researchers.
The Silicon Valley company intends to collaborate with the researchers to improve its performance.
"We're contacting the researchers to discuss their findings further. We take invalid traffic very seriously and have invested significantly in the technology and team that keep this out of our systems. The vast majority of invalid traffic is filtered from our systems before advertisers are ever charged," a spokesman said.
Prior to the incident, YouTube has always been viewed by advertisers as a highly credible advertising platform.
AdWords has uploaded well-explained video presentations on how to advertise on YouTube and how to monitor campaigns. Many small-time entrepreneurs, including an online cupcake business, shared stories on how customers learned about their emerging brands through YouTube.
Photo: Esther Vargas | Flickr
