Vevo’s reboot starts with iPhone app that knows the right tunes for you

After six months at the helm of the Internet’s biggest library of top music videos, Erik Huggers wants to show off the new Vevo. That begins with a revamped app.

Erik Huggers is ready to jump-start Vevo.

Six months ago, Huggers took command of the company, best known as home to many of the most popular music videos on the Internet. A revamp of its iPhone app, launched Thursday, is the prelude to more changes, he said, as Vevo updates its original content, considers new partners among social networks and telecom companies, and weighs a venture into subscriptions.

“Call it the reboot,” he said in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

Vevo is a powerful force in online music. Its catalog of 150,000 top official videos draws 12 billion views a month. But the company has grappled to establish an identity separate from YouTube. Though people can go to Vevo.com to watch its clips, the firm’s channel on Google’s massive video site is where most of the viewership of Vevo’s content occurs, and that means sharing ad revenue with Google. Huggers’ goal, starting with a mobile app that plays and discovers the right music videos for you, is for Vevo to mean more than just a logo at the bottom of popular YouTube clips.

That challenge is heightened by its ownership. Vevo is a joint venture of two of the three major music labels, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. The two rivals have to smooth their hackles for the business of Vevo to advance. In addition to outside investor Abu Dhabi Media, YouTube parent Google also holds a stake in Vevo, buying a roughly 7 percent share two years ago. That makes YouTube a partner, an investor and a competitor.

In fact, YouTube launched its own music-focused app hours before Vevo released its new app Thursday. The development of YouTube Music didn’t involve Vevo, according to T. Jay Fowler, YouTube’s head of music products, even though Vevo supplies the site with the preponderance of the most popular videos.

“Some people will love the YouTube app. Other people, we hope, will love the Vevo app,” Huggers said. Over the next few months, Vevo plans to introduce similar programs for devices run by Google’s Android system and for Apple TV.

Huggers’ outlook for Vevo made exploration a common refrain.

For one, the company is considering partnerships with new powerful players. This week, Vevo was among the video sites participating in a program at wireless carrier T-Mobile that lets some customers watch unlimited video that doesn’t count against their data allotment. Asked if social networks, telecom carriers or Internet service providers were in Vevo’s sights, Huggers said the company is exploring “anything and everything.”

“[That] list was very precise,” he said. “Certainly, that thought hasn’t been lost on us.”

Huggers wants to move the company into new frontiers for its own shows, as well. He said “mobile-first, premium short-form original content” would be “very, very important.” Clips like that are “a white space that is still to be figured out,” he said. He pointed to his hiring of Andy Parfitt as an indication of change. Like Huggers, Parfitt worked at the BBC, where he most recently led Radio 1. “We’re experimenting, and we will turn up the volume,” he said.

The company may eventually consider a subscription option to pair with its current business of ads that rack up revenue from free viewing. For now, though, Vevo is “completely focused” on the advertising-based model because the volume of viewing “blows the mind,” he said.

Vevo’s owners failed to sell Vevo last year, and longtime chief Rio Caraeff departed in November. Huggers took the reins in April. He previously ran chipmaker Intel’s effort to make an Internet TV service that was eventually sold to Verizon. Huggers rose to prominence as the executive who launched the BBC’s iPlayer online service, a vanguard of online television streaming.

For today, however, Huggers is focused on the company’s fresh app for Apple mobile devices.

The app is set up so first-time users visually pick through some favorite artists and say how they want to discover new content. The app has a Spotlight feature for content from favorite artists, and it simplifies playlist creation.

The goal was “making it simple, making it easy, making it clean,” he said, adding that sites like YouTube are the “one-stop shop for everything.” Vevo, he said, wants to be “a beautiful place for artists to showcase their work.”

He’s betting viewers will flock to beauty too.

Meet the YouTube Music app. This tune may ring a bell…

YouTube drowns out its old music service with fanfare for a new app that spins songs and music videos for everybody. (It just plays best if you pay.)

Here’s a familiar refrain: YouTube just launched a new home for music.

Thursday’s release of a dedicated YouTube Music app follows last year’s debut of YouTube Music Key, a subscription service that never expanded beyond a small, invite-only crowd of testers. It also comes after last month’s introduction of Red, the video site’s $10-a-month subscription service that strips away ads and gives members other mobile perks.

YouTube Music paired with Red renews the promise of Music Key after its failure to launch. YouTube is the Internet’s biggest video site by audience and the dominant legal source of music online. That reach puts YouTube in a unique position to popularize subscription music services with a mainstream audience. Not all people understand what a music subscription is, but almost everybody knows YouTube, and paying $10 a month to get rid of ads is a simple concept.

YouTube’s challenge is to make that concept attractive to the masses.

How big is YouTube? Every month, more than a billion individuals visit the Google-owned site — that’s one out every seven people on Earth. And that number is surely higher now. It hasn’t been updated in more than two years, all while other measurements of YouTube’s reach have grown. In March, daily viewers climbed 40 percent from a year earlier, and as of June the number of hours watched rose 60 percent.

With its music reboot, the company wanted something “uniquely YouTube,” said T. Jay Fowler, the company’s head of music products, who previously helped launch former music services Mog and Beats Music. “I’ve built two of these. Coming back to build a third, with things that are more the same than different, is just not the right approach,” he said.

A YouTube Red membership improves the music app. The monthly fee means ad-free watching. Members can listen when they’re not connected to a network, as on a plane or in a subway, and they can keep the music playing if they hop into a different app to respond to text messages or check their email.

But YouTube Music is open to nonpaying visitors. Similar to the site’s kids and gaming apps, YouTube Music carves out a special corner that makes finding and watching what you want easier when you’re in the mood for tunes. Fowler said YouTube “did something slightly less Google-y” with the app’s search, veering away from straightforward results to highlight a top pick, then stations based on that search, then other videos and songs. He said a lot of investment went into surfacing the right user-generated content — mashups, covers and dance homages — that distinguishes YouTube from rivals.

The recording industry is hanging hopes on music subscriptions as its best shot for making money in the digital age. Paid services are growing fast, but they’re still niche in the US. Subscriptions accounted for 15 percent of US music sales in the first half of the year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America trade group. Spotify is the world’s leading subscription music service, with 20 million paid subscribers and more than 75 million active listeners as of June.

Fowler disagreed with the idea that YouTube Music Key failed. He framed its year-long “beta” pilot with a narrow group of customers as a valuable testing ground. It taught Google that YouTube needed to switch gears and create a bigger paid service spanning all of the site’s videos. “We do betas at Google. Historically, things stay in beta for a long time,” he said.

A lot has changed in the year since the San Bruno, California-based site unwrapped Music Key. Apple debuted its first subscription service, Apple Music, in June. Like YouTube, the electronics giant benefits from a large base of potential customers, with credit card numbers for 800 million people on file in its iTunes store. So far it has signed up 6.5 million paying members. Meanwhile, Facebook, the biggest social network in the world, has lunged at video. It has doubled the number of daily video views to 8 billion in the last six months, quickly growing into a legitimate YouTube rival.

YouTube Music is available for devices running on Google’s own Android operating system and for Apple mobile devices. Downloading the app includes a 14-day free trial of YouTube Red with all the bonus features you normally need to pay for. YouTube Red offers a one-month free trial for new customers, which should give you the same benefits in YouTube Music at no charge for a longer time.

YouTube works toward ‘melt my brain’ virtual reality

In his first interview as the video empire’s engineering chief, Matthew Mengerink discusses virtual reality, making money and stepping into the role during trying times for YouTube’s engineers.

Soon after Matthew Mengerink became YouTube’s engineering chief a few weeks back, he got a taste of the virtual reality footage Google has been working on but hasn’t released to the public yet.

“I saw stuff that just melted my brain,” Mengerink said Tuesday in his first interview since joining the Google-owned video site.

Mengerink won’t go into detail about what he saw but gives general examples of the kinds of things VR can do, like taking you cycling through the Alps while you’re really just on your exercise bike. Or letting you stomp around the city pretending to be Godzilla. The world’s top tech companies, from Facebook to Samsung, have become enamored with virtual reality. Once mostly the dream of video game makers, Silicon Valley has expanded the vision for the technology.

“That’s the future technology of YouTube,” said Mengerink. “Those are the table stakes: How do you change the way people look at things?” That’s probably not exactly what the site’s 1 billion monthly visitors expect of YouTube. The juggernaut video service, which Google acquired in 2006, is known for its massive haul of cat videos, sports rants and makeup tutorials. But all of that is evolving as the site expands and becomes more ambitious.

On Wednesday, Google is launching YouTube Red, a subscription version of the service that nixes the ads and gives you access to original shows and movies from top YouTube talent for $10 a month. In August, Google launched YouTube Gaming, a hub dedicated to video game-related content. Google, which formed Alphabet as a new holding company for all its properties earlier this month, also plans to place the streaming media site at the heart of its virtual reality efforts. YouTube remained under Google in the reorganization.

“How do you change the way people look at things?”

It may not seem obvious, but Mengerink, a 43-year-old veteran of eBay and PayPal, said his e-commerce background makes him well-suited for the top engineering job at YouTube. As YouTube grows and looks for more ways to make money, Mengerink said there are similarities between maintaining sites like eBay and YouTube. eBay has various levels of sellers. YouTube has both casual uploaders and video creators whose goal is to make money.

“We need to make sure that monetization doesn’t interfere with the joy of watching videos,” he said. “That’s a hard balance to strike.”

Mengerink’s challenges aren’t only technical. He steps into the role after YouTube’s previous engineering chief, Venkat Panchapakesan, died in May. In the interim, engineering executive John Harding had taken on a leadership role. The move to bring in an outsider was controversial to some YouTube employees, according to a report by The Information.

“If I were in their shoes, I would find this very jarring,” Mengerink said. “This is a particularly trying time for the organization. I think there’s a bit of skepticism, and rightfully so.”

“Humbly speaking, it’s upon me to prove myself to everyone here,” he added, noting that Harding told him he’s “committed to the long term.”

For Google, YouTube has become a crucial part of the company. When the search giant announced quarterly results last week, a big part of Google’s success was the “amazing momentum” of YouTube, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. There has been an uptick in mobile advertising, and people are spending 60 percent more time watching videos on the site than they did a year ago. Meanwhile, competitors like Facebook and Amazon’s Twitch, aimed at video gamers, have become more aggressive in going to battle with YouTube.

As for virtual reality, Google last year unveiled Cardboard, a no-frills kit made of, well, cardboard that turns your smartphone into a VR headset. In May, the company said people would be able to directly watch VR videos on Cardboard through YouTube. All you will need to do is choose the VR function from the YouTube smartphone app.

“As virtual reality comes into being, how do we make sure people experience it on YouTube first?” said Mengerink. “This is the first inning of a nine-inning game.”

YouTube’s new engineering chief talks about promise of virtual reality

YouTube has grown into an online video empire. In his first interview as the site’s engineering chief, Matthew Mengerink discusses virtual reality, making money and stepping into the role during trying times for YouTube’s engineers.

Soon after Matthew Mengerink became YouTube’s engineering chief a few weeks ago, he got a taste of some of the virtual reality footage Google has been working on but hasn’t yet released to the public.

“I saw stuff that just melted my brain,” Mengerink said Tuesday in his first interview since joining the Google-owned video site.

He won’t go into detail about what he saw but gives general examples of the kinds of things VR can do, like taking you cycling through the Alps while you’re really just on your exercise bike. Or letting you stomp around the city pretending to be Godzilla.

The world’s top tech companies, from Facebook to Samsung, have become enamored with virtual reality. Once mostly the dream of video game makers, Silicon Valley has expanded the vision for the technology, an industry worth an estimated $7 billion.

“That’s the future technology of YouTube,” said Mengerink. “Those are the table stakes: How do you change the way people look at things?”

It’s probably not exactly the way the one billion people who visit the site every month think of YouTube. The juggernaut video service, which Google acquired in 2006, is known for its massive haul of cat videos, sports rants and makeup tutorials. But all of that is evolving as the site expands and becomes more ambitious.

On Wednesday, Google is launching YouTube Red, a subscription version of the service that nixes the ads and gives you access to original shows and movies from top YouTube talent for $10 a month. In August, Google launched YouTube Gaming, a hub dedicated to video game-related content. Google, which recently restructured as a holding company, also plans to place the streaming media site at the heart of its virtual reality efforts.

It’s not obvious, but Mengerink, a 43-year-old veteran of eBay and PayPal, said his background makes him well-suited for the top engineering job at YouTube. After all, a career at e-commerce companies doesn’t automatically make you the right person to make sure people’s video streams don’t buffer incessantly.

As YouTube grows and looks for more ways to make money, Mengerink said there are similarities in maintaining sites like eBay and YouTube. eBay has various levels of sellers, from one-off dealers to mom and pop shops, as well as buyers. YouTube has viral video-seekers, along with casual video uploaders and creators who want to make money.

“We need to make sure that monetization doesn’t interfere with the joy of watching videos,” he said. “That’s a hard balance to strike.”

Mengerink’s challenges aren’t only technical. He steps into the role after YouTube’s previous engineering chief, Venkat Panchapakesan, died in March. In the interim, engineering executive John Harding had taken on a leadership role. The move to bring in an outsider was controversial to some YouTube employees, according to a report by The Information.

“If I were in their shoes, I would find this very jarring,” Mengerink said. “This is a particularly trying time for the organization. I think there’s a bit of skepticism, and rightfully so.”

“Humbly speaking, it’s upon me to prove myself to everyone here,” he said. He added that Harding told him he’s “committed to the long-term.”

For Google, YouTube has become a crucial part of the company. When the search giant announced quarterly results last week, a big part of Google’s success was the “amazing momentum” of YouTube, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. There has been an uptick in mobile advertising, and people are spending 60 percent more time watching videos on the site than they did a year ago. Meanwhile, competitors like Facebook and Amazon’s Twitch, aimed a video gamers, have become more aggressive in going to battle with YouTube.

As for virtual reality, Google last year unveiled Cardboard, a no-frills kit made of, well, cardboard that turns your smartphone into a VR headset. In May, the company said people would be able to directly watch VR videos on Cardboard through YouTube. All you will need to do is choose the VR function from the YouTube smartphone app.

“As virtual reality comes into being, how do we make sure people experience it on YouTube first?” said Mengerink. “This is the first inning of a nine inning game.”

Google, now Alphabet, spells success with mobile, YouTube

Google is known for driverless cars, but when it comes to the tech giant’s immediate future, all signs point to mobile ads and its massive video site. Its latest earnings top estimates.

Google, reporting its first earnings as the new holding company Alphabet, said it owed its profit and sales success last quarter to having six products with more than a billion users apiece.

They are search, the mobile operating system Android, the Web browser Chrome, maps, the marketplace Play and YouTube.

But Google executives on Thursday specifically called out YouTube.

The Google-owned video giant has become synonymous with online video. Every month, more than a billion people, or one of every seven on the planet, visit the site to watch movie trailers, get makeup tips or see cute animals do something adorable.

That appetite for cat videos does more than satisfy our collective dopamine receptors; it’s also good for Google.

So much so that the Mountain View, California, company has been expanding YouTube’s offerings to get you to spend even more time on the site. On Wednesday, Google announced YouTube Red, a subscription version of the service that for $10 a month nixes the ads and gives you access to original shows and movies from top YouTube talent. In August, Google launched YouTube Gaming, a hub dedicated to video game-related content.

“The shift to video is a profound medium shift, especially in the context of mobile,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on a conference call. He said the video site has had “amazing momentum,” especially on smartphones and tablets.

The result is an ever-sprawling video powerhouse that in many ways points to the future of Google. In July, Google CFO Ruth Porat said videos kept people watching 60 percent longer than they did a year ago. On smartphones and tablets — the preferred places for advertisers, aka Google’s lifeblood — the average watch time is 40 minutes. That’s double what it was a year ago, Porat said.

On Thursday, announcing results for the quarter ended September 30, Google said it beat Wall Street expectations for sales and profit, thanks to “substantial growth” in mobile search sales. One of the biggest contributors: YouTube.

Third-quarter sales were $18.67 billion, Google/Alphabet said in a statement. Profit, after adjustments for stock-based compensation and other items, was $7.35 a share. Analysts had estimated $18.53 billion in revenue and earnings of $7.21 per share.

Investors are happy. At 3:30 p.m. PT, Alphabet’s stock jumped more than 11 percent in after-hours trading to more than $725. The company also said it will repurchase $5 billion in shares starting in the fourth quarter.

Earlier this month, Google restructured itself under a new holding company named Alphabet, part of an effort to make it easier for each unit to develop new projects, faster. On Thursday, Alphabet said it will keep reporting financial results for Google’s business — which includes YouTube, search and maps — as a single group. Other businesses, including its X research lab and device maker Nest, will be reported as a combined group known as “Other Bets.”

Still, even with the company’s outsize ambitions, it all comes back to the tiny video startup Google acquired in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

It doesn’t look like Google will slow its expansion of YouTube anytime soon. The site will be a key part of Google’s virtual-reality efforts. Last year, the company unveiled Google Cardboard, a no-frills kit made of, well, cardboard that turns your smartphone into a VR headset. In May, the company said people would be able to directly watch VR videos on Cardboard through YouTube. All you will need to do is choose the VR function from the YouTube smartphone app.

Google can use YouTube as a place to experiment with video, like trying to make it more interactive or immersive, said Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner.

“How can Google reinvent video over time?” he said. “That is going to be really powerful for YouTube going forward.”

In the meantime, what are people watching? YouTube lists the top videos of the moment here. Unsurprisingly, No. 1 is the new “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” trailer, which premiered Monday night.

YouTube Gaming makes recording on-the-go easier

People already have their eyes glued to gaming videos on YouTube for 144 billion minutes every month, but the first update to its dedicated gameplay app will help create even more mobile-game footage for viewers to watch.

YouTube is making it easier for people to record themselves playing every mobile game that has them hooked.

People watch 144 billion minutes, or nearly 274,000 years, worth of footage depicting people playing video games on YouTube every month, according to data from Google’s massive video site. Put another way, if the first Neanderthals sat in a cave and only watched video games on YouTube all day and night, they might be caught up with the globe’s monthly viewing right about now.

The San Bruno, California-based video site updated its YouTube Gaming mobile app Thursday so that anyone can record and live-stream mobile gameplay from devices running Google’s Android operating system, the most common mobile OS in the world. Called Mobile Capture, the feature lets gamers tap a “Go Live” button in the YouTube Gaming app to start recording themselves with their phone’s “selfie” camera and microphone.

Mobile games are extraordinarily popular among mainstream consumers, with games routinely the most downloaded category of apps in yearly rankings from data cruncher App Annie. YouTube’s biggest channel features a gamer. Felix Kjellberg, a Swede known as PewDiePie, has 39.8 million subscribers and made $12 million pretax over the past year, according to an estimate by Forbes.

YouTube Gaming’s update peels away a layer of tech savvy needed to become a video game streamer like Kjellberg. This means more people can try broadcasting, and it’s more likely you’ll come across a gaming clip that appeals to you.

“The one thing that YouTube is all about is empowering people to broadcast and share,” said Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s head of gaming content and partnerships. “This gives you the accessibility of any game.”

Twitch, YouTube’s main competitor in the gameplay video world, made a first step in the same direction last year. The company released a kit for game developers to help them add this kind of mobile broadcasting to their own games. However, support is on a game-by-game basis. The YouTube Gaming feature blankets every game you can play on an Android device and requires no extra work on the part of a game maker.

Last year, people watched Twitch video for about 16 billion minutes per month. Though Twitch’s figure has grown over the last 10 months, YouTube’s 144 billion minutes dwarf the smaller rival’s stats from 2014.

YouTube took a page out of Twitch’s book with another addition to the app update: sponsorships. A handful of gaming channels will begin to offer $3.99 monthly sponsorships, which let fans pay their favorite creators and unlock perks like a badge next to their name in a video’s live-chat window and access to exclusive chat sessions.

Sponsorships are starting with about a half dozen YouTube gaming channels at launch and will expand over time. So far, the channels include Miniminter, TwoSync and HikePlays.

In addition to the Android app, YouTube Gaming also comes in an iOS version. The Mobile Capture feature is limited to Android devices for now, a YouTube spokeswoman said, but the company would explore expanding it.

Cyber-thieves hit YouTube Fifa gamers

Six of the most successful Fifa video gamers to feature on YouTube have been targeted by cyber-thieves.

The hackers stole millions of Fifa coins, the games virtual currency, and sold players worth thousands of pounds.

They are thought to have convinced manufacturer EA Sports to transfer their victims’ Origin accounts to email addresses the hackers controlled.

Many other well-known players who do not make videos are also believed to have been hit.

AnesonGib, W2S, Nepenthez, Nick28T, Bateson87 and matthdgamer have more than five million YouTube subscribers between them.

Matthew Craig, the man behind matthdgamer, told the BBC: “There have been about 10 or more accounts which have been hacked over the last two weeks, me included.”

In a video, Nick28T said: “Basically, someone called in pretending to be me and… got in to my account.”

An EA representative said: “We encourage all Fifa players to secure their accounts with authentication and verification steps, which we outline on our help and our product sites.

“We are consistently working through our customer experience teams to secure accounts and make sure players are educated when account compromises are made.”

Mr Craig said EA had apologised to him about the attack and had moved quickly to help him once he had reported it.

“They got my account back, added four or five more security measures, and my account has been fine since,” he said.

YouTube to Expand Shopping Links to More Videos

YouTube announced on Tuesday that it would introduce shopping ads on its videos that let viewers jump directly to retailers’ websites and buy the products featured in the clips.

The video-sharing site, owned by Google, already lets advertisers show links to products within their own videos. But the new service would place product ads on any video on the site, like product reviews uploaded by amateur reviewers, provided the clip’s owner opts in.

YouTube’s new ads bring a shopping element to yet another corner of the Internet, as highly trafficked websites and social networking services increasingly fashion themselves into shopping hubs.

Sites like Pinterest and Instagram have introduced “buy button” functions that let users purchase the products that appear in the millions of posts and photos shared on their platforms each day. Google itself has pushed to become a shopping destination in an increasingly direct challenge to Amazon, currently the web’s de facto shopping search engine.

YouTube’s ads seek to tap into the fast growth in product reviews and tutorials posted by users. Susan Wojcicki, the company’s chief executive, announced the change at an advertising industry event in New York.

In the last year alone, viewership for product-related clips on YouTube has jumped 40 percent, she said. YouTube users have already uploaded tens of thousands of reviews of a battery-powered self-balancing skateboardlike device that retailers expect to be a hot holiday gift this year.

Once the service is available in the coming months, videos from users who opt into the program, and which contain products that match YouTube ads, will display an icon in the top-right corner.

Users can click on the icon to view a list of images and prices of the products featured in the video, and to jump to retailers’ websites for more reviews, information and an option to buy.

“Over the course of the year, we’ve been working hard to make videos more interactive, shortening the distance between the time a viewer sees an ad and their actual purchase,” YouTube said in a news release.

YouTube’s shopping ads are becoming available as Google struggles to turn the site’s more than a billion users, and its near-ubiquitous presence on the web, into profits.

Since Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, the site has introduced skippable ads as one way to raise more advertising dollars. YouTube has also invested in a slate of homegrown stars, like the makeup guru Michelle Phan, and has created TV-like channels to get more viewers to visit the site directly instead of simply watching videos embedded on other websites.

YouTube has already taken some early steps into e-commerce, inviting some advertisers to set up their own channels that mix video content and links to product pages.

But that program, introduced in 2013, does not appear to have gained much traction. A channel featuring the Tresemmé hair care brand, set up by Unilever, one of the first YouTube clients to participate, has amassed only 22,000 subscribers.

Still, YouTube is increasing its efforts. This year, it introduced a set of services that let advertisers embed links to products in their videos. YouTube’s new ads use similar technology, but they will show ads on any YouTube video that opts into the program.

YouTube matches videos with ads based on the video’s content and audience. Similar to YouTube’s AdWords service, advertisers pay only when a user clicks on a shopping ad. The site will test the ads this fall, and will offer the service to AdWords clients in the coming months, it said.

For users who upload YouTube videos, the shopping ads could mean a new revenue stream, the sites said. And for viewers, YouTube promises an unobtrusive way to shop as they surf videos.

Google ‘charges for YouTube adverts viewed by bots’

Google charges marketers even when its own checks indicate that adverts were not viewed by human beings, according to researchers.

The experts reported that YouTube did not count many of the “fake views” they directed at their own videos. But it still charged the researchers for many of them.

The case highlighted the need for more transparent analytics, said one expert.

Google said it would work 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.

The experts tested the systems employed by five video platforms, including YouTube.

More discerning

In the case of the Google-owned site YouTube, they uploaded videos and bought ads targeted at them using Google’s AdWords service. They then set up a series of bots – automated systems that carry out their commands – to target fake views at the videos.

YouTube carries out two separate counts of video views. The first, called the public view count, determines how many times the video has been seen and is displayed publicly. The second, the monetised view count, determines the viewership for the purposes of calculating advertising charges.

The researchers found that the public view counter was significantly more discerning than the monetised one. On two of the videos they uploaded, Google publicly counted only 25 of the 150 fake views as real. But its monetised view counter waved through 91.

They also found that they were charged for fake views on another two videos, but YouTube then identified the activity as suspicious in a secondary check and suspended the associated account.

‘Unreliable statistics’

“YouTube uses a seemingly permissive detection mechanism to discount fake monetised views,” wrote the researchers, who are from four institutions – UC3M, Imdea, NEC Labs Europe and Polito.

They said that the issue “exposed advertisers to the risk of building their advertisement campaigns on unreliable statistics” when the public view counter was “much more discriminative”, demonstrating that YouTube was capable of more accurately identifying fake views.

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What are bots?

Bots are used by a host of companies – such as search engines and analytics firms – to crawl the web to draw out information and index and archive web pages. A 2013 study suggested that they responsible for more than 60% of all web traffic.

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Daniel Knapp, an expert in advertising at IHS analysts, said that the issue had already caused widespread concern.

“We have a paradoxical situation where there is much more data than ever before, but even less information on what it actually means.

“There is no single standard online. In this context, the issue has come up time and again. Google published a report saying that only 54% of video adverts is even seen, not including that on YouTube, where the figure was 91%.

“Large advertisers want to measure a return on their investments and do not trust the metrics that online companies provide. There is huge pressure to up the game and provide clear measurement of adverts. The problem is that there is no gold standard,” he said.

You’ll soon be able to stream Android games live to YouTube

YouTube has announced that Android phones will soon be able to stream live video to the service, in a move partly designed to capitalize on the popularity of mobile gaming in Japan and elsewhere. The update doesn’t have a date set yet, but is said to be coming “soon,” along with a Japanese version of the new YouTube Gaming app.

Japan will be the first market in Asia to get YouTube Gaming following the launch last month in the US and UK; the announcement comes on the first day of Tokyo Game Show. “Japan’s mobile games define its gaming culture, far more so than in other countries,” says YouTube’s global gaming head Ryan Wyatt in a statement. “This trend shows there’s a real need for gamers to easily share what’s on their screen with the gaming community, as it happens.”

YouTube Gaming faces an considerable battle to compete with Amazon-owned Twitch, which has built a loyal following in the core video games community. But by focusing on mobile in untapped markets like Japan, as well as providing a slick interface and smart features like rewinding, YouTube could well find ways to set itself apart.