David Sarno from the LA Times has spotted a couple of times that video’s have appeared in You Tube’s “most viewed” list that do not deserve to be there. In both cases the video’s that appeared had less than 10% of the views of other videos in the list. Also in both cases multiple entries from the same publisher were incorrectly in the top viewed list.
While You Tube has claimed that it was due to a glitch in the system. However the videos involved in both cases were advertisements. One for a perfume company and the other from a new movie with the multiple videos being different versions of the ads. It does seem suspicioius that both occurances of a “glitch” would involve ads rather than other regualar content.
In fairness, two occurances are not conclusive proof. There is also multiple ways that You Tube can put paid content on its frontpage in the form of ads and featured content. We expect ads on web-sites, but we our level of truxt in the site is directly proportional to how easy it is to tell those ads from real content. If You Tube does get found to be inserting paid content unfairly into its “top” lists it will likely create an uproar similar to “pay-per-post”.
A lot of attention will no doubt now be focussed on the top viewed results over the next couple of weeks.