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A comment on YouTube views down for channels with more than 10M subscribers, analysis says. Parent comment

Re:YouTube views down for channels with more than 10M subscr... by minimaxir on Friday December 23, 2016 @02:58PM (#13246876)
Last year I did an analysis of YouTube videos by mass-scraping as much data as possible. (http://minimaxir.com/2015/06/cars-2/)

I found out that the most-viewed Gaming video...is a random video of the game-of-the-movie Cars 2, due to kid viewership alone. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urHuO7Zbhhw)

(I'd love to look at YouTube data again in light of the recent controversies, but it appears the API limitations have not changed since, which makes data scraping again a major hassle)

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Re:YouTube views down for channels with more than 10M subscr... by thrownblown on Friday December 23, 2016 @04:53PM (#13247403)
I think that there's another element to some of the automated content channels like "Toys in Japan". They make content based on comments on other videos, was hacked according to Goodwin's Law. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OoU2ck2RiY)

My pet theory is that these channels are monetized for automated click farms and they use children's content partly because kids will watch it, obfuscating the bot-clicks, and more-so that they can increase the safe threshold of bot-clicks/bot-views since children's viewing habits are to watch the same video repeatedly.

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