Google Is Still Monetising Fake YouTube Views

We thought it would be over by now — especially when YouTube and video marketing has become such a big and important field in the online marketing world.

But, sadly, it is still a big issue.

According to the latest research by several European research institutions, Google is still charging advertisers when their YouTube ads are viewed robots.

The participants in the said study are NEC Labs Europe, IMDEA Networks Institute, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Politcenino di Torino (an Italian engineering university). They found out that of all the major video websites, YouTube has, by far, the most sophisticated fraud detection systems. In their study, YouTube identified 83% of the bots they unleashed on their own videos. However, the problem that they identified was that 91% of those total views were charged by AdWords.

In simple words, if you still haven’t got what it all means, “Google did identify those views as fake and, therefore, discounted them from the total public view count. However, it still monetized those views.”

The researchers employed several strategies to find how big the impact is, and they concluded that the numbers are particularly alarming and something should be done about it as soon as possible.

And now is the perfect time to be proactive and take a step to resolve this issue because more and more marketers are considering to use videos as one of their most important channels. According to a recent industry report by Social Media Examiner, 57% of marketers are currently using videos. Moreover, 72% are interested in increasing their usage of video marketing.

However, the good news is that Google has taken notice of it.

One of the Google spokesperson told the Financial Times that the search giant will contact the mentioned researchers to discuss their findings. The official further assured that the company has invested heavily in technology and talent to “keep this out of our systems. The vast majority of invalid traffic is filtered from our systems before advertisers are ever charged.”