The video, titled “CANSEI DE SER SEXY Music is My Hot Hot Sex,” features the Brazilian band CSS dancing awkwardly in front of a giant white screen while having colorful movie effects superimposed over them. Clarus Bartel, the video's creator, obtained raw footage of the band and mixed it with the then virtually unknown song, Music is My Hot Hot Sex. Eventually, a British university student named Nick Haley saw the video and downloaded the song. He was inspired by the lyric “My music is where I’d like you to touch” and decided to use footage from Apple.com to create an ad for the IPod Touch and post it on YouTube. The video got popular and was seen by an Apple employee, who forwarded it to Apple's longtime ad agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day. The agency liked it so much that they contacted Nick Haley and recruited him to create a television quality version. The commercial was shown during the World Series and propelled the song and Clarus Bartel's video into the mainstream.
Although this does explain millions of views, YouTube users don't believe that this alone accounts for the unprecedented rise of Bartel's video. They point out that while Bartel's video has almost 100 million views, it has fewer than 5,000 comments and has been favorited less than 11,000 times. This appears very suspicious when compared to Evolution of Dance, which has been viewed almost 80 million times and has almost 125,000 comments and has been favorited almost 400,000 times. Many YouTube users attacked Bartel's video, forming a mobocracy of sorts, and started accusing Bartel of hacking YouTube.
YouTube users rebel by trying to lower the video's rating. Bartel sees this and disables ratings.
Angry YouTube users leave comments of disbelief and anger.
Andy Baio at waxy.org interviewed Bartel shortly after YouTube refreshed its leaderboards. When asked about the possibility of gaming the YouTube system, Bartel replied, “I get constant messages accusing me of being a hacker, when I barely know how to turn a computer on and off. Some people call me a genius, because I beat the system. Everyone is free to imagine me as they choose, however they prefer.” Given the fact that he is a semi-prominent music blogger, it appears he is understating his computer skills. Luckily for us, he wasn't able to attain this amazing feat without unintentionally unveiling some valuable insider marketing tactics.
When a user searches on YouTube, the results are determined by the relevancy of the user's query with the combination of the title, tags, and description of a given video. By manipulating these variables, it is easy to craft YouTube search results. This seems to be the case with this video. Below are the tags chosen by Bartel.
cansei | de | ser | sexy | Music | Ipod | touch | commercial | hot | sex | boyfriend | music | apple | nick | haley | computer | Barack | Obama
While the first ten tags are legitimate, the remaining eight were chosen to increase the video's visibility. The related terms, 'Nick' and 'Haley', are obviously being used to draw views away from the original ad's creator. 'Boyfriend', 'Computer', 'Barack', and 'Obama' are blatantly used to get traffic from highly searched terms. This approach is seen again with previous titles of the same video. For example, a week before the video hit number one it was titled “VOTE OBAMA 08 CANSEI DE SER SEXY Music is My Hot Hot Sex.” This tactic of keyword stuffing in the title was used in conjunction with a “Vote Obama” image displayed next to the video (Clarus Bartel's profile picture).
Although understanding Bartel's tactics are enlightening, exploring the fundamental flaws that he exposed are what is really interesting. On YouTube, a video is graded by comments, ratings, and views. Unfortunately, all three of these criteria have become ineffective due to misuse.
In the vast majority of cases, comments are such low quality that they add virtually no value to the video page.
Useless YouTube Comments
Star-ratings have also become useless. Without a single point of view, these ratings lack a reference point and therefore provide little value. My vote of one star as a video viewer is weighed equally with the content provider's mother who rates the video as five stars. The problem is worsened by the fact that the amount of times videos have been rated is not visible in YouTube's SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). When searching, there is no way to see if a rating is based on one vote or one million votes.
YouTube videos with the same ratings while having wildly different amount of views. The amount of times the video has been rated is not shown. Thus, the ratings are useless.
This leaves the users with only the number of views to judge the quality of a video before watching it.
YouTube's confusing SERPs. Views is the only way to gauge a video's worth before watching it.
The views, however, are the easiest to manipulate. YouTube's video views are based off of page views rather than page visits. This means that if the content provider simply refreshes his or her video over and over again, the video will start to appear more worthy of clicks on the YouTube's SERPs. Although the views by the content creator are not always counted at a one to one ratio, it is still extremely easy to boost one's own video. This is not immediately obvious to many people because the view numbers do not update in real time, but it absolutely does work.
The tendency for users to click the most viewed video in the SERPs combined with how easy it is to generate fake views could be linked to the rapid success of Bartel's video. (Note: I am not saying he did this, I am merely explaining how it could have been done given the circumstances of his video's fast success.) Imagine if a devious user chose to manipulate video rankings on YouTube. One could potentially utilize the high traffic at social media sites to provide almost limitless views from different IP addresses. Let's say an article that went popular on Digg contained a 1 pixel iframe of a video page on YouTube. Anyone who viewed that article would unintentionally add views to that video. This practice would explain how Bartel's video received so many views in such a short period of time while receiving so few comments and links. This idea is not new and has already been used with variations on MySpace (see Samy, and thank you to DangerMouse for the clarification). It is naive to think that YouTube would not also be targeted by a similar attack.
To counter this, YouTube engineers need to implement a real ranking system. Just like the SERPs on modern search engines, the SERPs on YouTube should display the most useful and related results first. To achieve this, the new ranking system should be based on the following criteria:
- Intelligent User Rankings - System based off of comparing the current user's 'favorited' videos to other users on YouTube. The resulting data relationships could then be used to only display ratings by people with similar taste.
- Intelligent Links – A system similar to PageRank. Google (YouTube's owner) already has an organized index of the web and all the HTTP referrer data to YouTube. Combining the data is easily within reach.
- Intelligent Views - Amount of visits that resulted in more than 70% of a video being watched.
At the time of posting, YouTube has already made the first step. While Clarus Bartel's video is still credited with having almost 90 million views, it has been removed from the most views of all time list. The unwashed masses of YouTube are once again calm, as the Evolution of Dance has regained its throne. Hopefully this will be a big enough lesson to persuade YouTube to implement the necessary changes. If not, we are sure to see many more videos wrongfully move up the leaderboards and detract from the value of YouTube.
"...how easy it is to generate fake views could be linked to the rapid success of Bartel's video."
Where there's a will - there's a way. Where there's a way - there's a massive army willing to exploit it.
It would take almost nothing to execute a few different scripts to bombard a video with page views.
I'm sure there will be a Matt Cutts of Youtube very soon - if not already.
Danny - this was an outstanding post. Very well done.
That massive army is better explained here -
https://seoblackhat.com/2008/03/09/hot-sex/
The important part of the link posted is here -
"Here’s the deal. Probably about 18 months ago, a fellow spammer said to me “If you know anyone who will pay to get something to the top of the most viewed in Youtube, let me know. It’s easy, we tested it and it works.” YouTube allows a mere HEAD requests count as page views. With several persistent connections (or a BotNet or however you want to slice it), you can give someone hundreds or of views a second without using a lot of bandwidth. Spamming Youtube works, it’s easy, it’s been done."
Ahhh, the power of the script kiddee botnet!
Danny, thanks for taking the time to put this all together. I had seen news of his video yesterday but got caught up in other things and didn't take any time to investigate. Your post here covers nearly every detail that I'd be looking for. Awesome stuff!
Looks like YouTube spam won't be as easy anymore ;)
I have been VERY surprised by the ease of manipulation at the site and have been wondering when the blogosphere would cry out and put an end to this.
I know of different LARGE movie conglomerates who are buying traffic to their trailers, etc. for a penny or less per visitor. They are using third tier search engines and other ways to send untargeted traffic to their videos which manually inflates their views and pushes them to the top of the lists. They viewed this as a way of being legit by not using bots or other means of inflating the views.
Let's see how long it takes Google to start making some changes to the YouTube algorithm.
Side Note: iframing in a YouTube video still plays the music (even though they don't see the video, so this tactic is much easier to detect by users who would eventually report this technique.
Thankings for bringing that up. I read an article a while back on Techcrunch about big companies using guerilla marketing agencies to achieve the results you mentioned. I was actually in the midst of writing a post about how I think YouTube is the most underused marketing platform by small marketers when I found the above story. Only time will tell if this was a big enough signal to make Google upgrade YouTube.
By the way I did concider the iframe noise issue. If a "devious person" could post an image on Digg, they could rely on the fact that most Diggers only spend a few seconds on a given image before clicking away. If the YouTube video didn't have music for say the first 15 seconds while a title screen or FBI warning was being shown the trick would still work. ;-)
Timing would be crucial, but it wouldn't be too hard to sync up how long you'd expect the average person to look at a piece of content with how long you'd need to maintain silence at the beginning of a video. You'd be surprised how long 15 seconds is, too. I'd be willing to bet that most [pic] submissions aren't viewed for more than 10 seconds.
A YouTube viewer, given something interesting to look at for the first (silent) six or seven seconds of a video, probably won't notice.
Genius!
You get thumbs from me, Danny, if not solely for this:
QuadsZilla over at seoblackhat.com (https://seoblackhat.com/2008/03/09/hot-sex/) had a post about how YouTube was spammed on this
David
I was going to say the same thing. Great work Danny - checkout Quadszilla's take as well, I think you'll find it interesting. Here's a live link. (although it's not responding for me at the mo).
"Useless YouTube Comments" is a redundancy.
Interesting article although XSS is certainly not an appropriate term to describe a hidden iFrame.
lol thanks for keeping me honest. I kept going back and forth on including the XSS line in the post. In my example the Digg article would need to contain a link that pointed at a dynamic YouTube page (SERPs?) with code injected in it. Then it would be a traditional Type 1 XSS attack.
My problem was I could not think of a more appropriate term for using one page (Digg) to manipulate another page (YouTube).
Can you think of a better term for it?
really good stuff danny- good to broaden our horizons away to some interesting stuff every so often.
Interesting how many political pundits saw popularity of a candidates videos on Youtube as a measure of success... now we know ;)
Enlightening! Sexy Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton Dancing to Ipod Music Conceive Alien Apple-Headed Offspring, sounds like a great humor topic. :)
Really nice post Danny. It's almost like YouTube was Google about 5 years ago.
One thing:
You're just too innocent - Mozzers, please introduce Danny to one of Rand's blackhat acquaintances!
;)
Danny's not innocent. He's just stating things... "delicately."
I have nothing really to add that others haven't done so already: great post, very enlightening, etc.
I love it when someone does a "deep dive" on things like this.
Hi! First time posting here. Yes, it does look like a hack. For all you know, it may just be a prank- like, hey-i-know-we-can-try-this-out-ok-lets-do-it.
It almost seems ridiculous the whole world would be logging into Youtube to see him singing and rocking when there are more important world news outside.
Thanks for your post. It's eye opening to see how every system in the world HAS to be manipulated for immaterial gains. I hope youtube works on your suggestions.
-clearice
This article needs to be updated. Bartel's video no longer exists and youtube has updated its algorithms in 2010 again.
Thanks for your post. Every day I feel more like I have to get into this SEO Technical stuff. To be able to understand things like:
"I kept going back and forth on including the XSS line in the post. In my example the Digg article would need to contain a link that pointed at a dynamic YouTube page (SERPs?) with code injected in it. Then it would be a traditional Type 1 XSS attack."
All chinese to me...
What would be a good reading I can do to get into learning the basics of thecnical stuff an SEO must know? Can you guys help me? Thanks
SEO Practices,
SEO technical stuff is a very broad term. If you are looking for information on web developer SEO techniques feel free to read the Onsite optimization part of our SEO guide.
In regards to the quote, XSS (Cross-site scripting) is not an SEO technique. It is a type of website vulnerability that allows someone to inject code onto a website they don't own. Its a problem that has affected almost every major website including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Digg.
I think the best way to protect yourself is to learn how to do all of the basic website 'hacking' techniques. I read a great article recenly that gave an overview of all the common ways to hack a website. I recommend reading it help you think more like a "hacker".
If you want anymore information feel free to e-mail or private message me. All my info is my profile.
very good post Danny. It is covers most of the points about YouTube's ranking and it is very interesting.
As you mentionned, the "Intelligent use rankings, links and views" should be implemented in order to have a better overall ranking. But is YouTube willing to move up to the next level, and have its videos rating appearing like the SERPs ? Isn't YT "just" a website where people share their vids ?
Last year Lending Club hosted a video contest where the winner would get $5,000. Scoring was based on whoever got the most YouTube views. Of course, there were all sorts of gaming allegations.
When it came time to present the awards they decided to give three other awards - best video, best storyboard and a jury prize in addition to the most YouTube views.
I wrote several articles about the contest at the time:
Lending Club video contest posts
Great posting! ExSEOllent analysis of how YouTube was gamed, and brilliantly so! Glad the perpetrator has been exposed, and agree that tightening up is needed. Am sure there will be a tightening up of defences at YouTube!
Great post, Danny... Yeah, social media should evolve to protect itself from spamming. Flickr adding nofollow to image page links just recently, YOUTube feeling the need to improve relevancy...
In Youtube case gaming does make the system better in a way, isn't it? :)
That was a rocker Danny. Most of the people watch Youtube for entertainment and it doesnt hurts to tag your video with high searched keywords like 'sex','britney' even if your video is about a boring lazy cat. There is so much traffic on these tags that with an enticing title and description, if not watch, you can make visitors atleast click on the video. After some time views start multiplying. Videos views increase even when the video has a high 'bounce rate'.
To add to your recommendations, I think Youtube must make sure that videos are submitted in a relevant category with the video with the most back links and lowest bounce rate ranks on the Video Research Page. The rating option must be available to the user only after he has watched atleast 70% of the video...
Thanks for the insight Danny. Excellent piece of information.
Very great post! We weren't aware of the various ways you could manipulate the views on YouTube and this is a great example of the misuse of tags and the comparisons brought about with other highly commented/ranked videos to this one -- greatness. Enjoyed this article thoroughly. YouTube definitely has some much needed adjustments to do.