Avril Lavigne Breaks YouTube Record

Yesterday Twitter was abuzz as we watched Avril Lavigne’s music video for the song Girlfriend climb in viewership to beat the “most watched” record at YouTube with over 92 million views. The record was previously held by Evolution of Dance.

92 million views, wow! How did she do it? Well actually, she didn’t. Avril fans artificially built views on the video by creating a web site with her YouTube video on it that automatically reloaded every 15 seconds. Then, they encouraged everyone to leave the site open and within a short time, her video would be a record breaker. The stunt worked and Avril now has the most “watched” video on YouTube.

Astroturfing isn’t just for PR firms anymore. We now have fanstroturfing.

I use the word “watched” loosely. The music video Girlfriend is 3 minutes and 48 seconds long, but fans chose to refresh it every 15 seconds. This got me wondering what constitutes a “watch” according to YouTube? Did fans pick 15 second haphazardly or is 15 seconds the minimum amount of time you have to watch a video in order for it to count as a view?

I asked on Twitter if anybody knew how YouTube counts views and @bbuset pointed me to Tubemogul’s What Counts as a View? article. As it turns out, you only have to let the player begin on YouTube for it to count. What this means is that YouTube counts play of <1 second as a view.

Then, coincidentally (?) TechCrunch posted this article Does Google Know How to Count? Some YouTube Views Don’t Seem to Register. Comments revealed further findings about YouTube metrics including:

• Views on embedded sites DO count.
• Above is currently not true when autoplay is turned on (although it was and may be again).
• Clicks on the “replay” button do not count on external embeds.
• View counts aren’t dynamically updated, but refreshed at certain times (something I had noticed before.)
• YouTube blocks counts from one IP address after 200 refreshes (likely per session.)

One potential problem with this type of artificial inflation is chewing through advertising impressions without any actual eyeballs viewing the ads. If instead of an embed, a YouTube page was refreshed using an iframe, any ads served in those 15 seconds would mean money changing hands from advertiser to YouTube (and sometimes) to partner. The same could happen with a simple embed if in-video advertising was turned on.

Most advertisers buy blocks of impressions over a certain period of time — say 100,000 for one month. If this sort of artificial build gained popularity, those ~3000 ad serves a day could be eaten up within minutes and not have reached any actual eyeballs.

What I find the most interesting about this stunt though is exploring what measurements ultimately count for online video.

92 million views is impressive, but how many of those actually translate to full views of her video, new fans or (down the long tail) purchases of Avril product?

Columnist Matthew Ingram points out that there’s a disproportionally low level of discussion on the video vs. number of views. Ingram also wrote previously that comments are an important payback.

Time spent is an increasingly important measurement for site owners and advertisers, but most user contributed sites don’t tell you how long somebody watched your video for, just that they did (and once again, that watch can be under one second.)

Do any of these metrics matter? Or is simply breaking the record a big enough stunt that articles (such as this one) will get written about it and Avril will get new views, fans and purchases anyway?

Tags: advertising, measurement, Metrics, video, YouTube

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Metrics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.