Lady Gaga Loses Millions Of YouTube Views
Lady Gaga has lost several millions of views on YouTube after the site cleared out what were considered “fake statistics” built by bots and hackers. Some lesser known YouTube channel owners have used bots as a way to beef up their view counts, but Lady Gaga is not one of them.
Lady Gaga is a well-known celebrity who uses other unconventional means to gain fame. As previously reported by The Inquisitr, she wore a gun bra for her first concert after the Sandy Hook shooting.
Lady Gaga encountered the sudden drop one month after the Sony and UniversalYouTube pages were stripped of 2 billion YouTube views. YouTube decided that videos migrated to their VEVO pages were “dead videos.” A small portion of the loss is the result of what YouTube calls “de-spamming the data.” Most of what affected Sony and Universal was a result of Sony, Universal, and EMI‘s decision to bet on VEVO.
VEVO is owned by Sony and Universal Music Group. According to the Huffington Post, other artists affected by YouTube‘s bot sweeps include Beyonce and Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson has no need of YouTube to maintain his fan base, but that’s beside the point.
According to E! Online, the decision was made last month. A YouTube spokesperson told Billboard at the time:
“This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our viewcount policy.”
Of course, YouTube has been diligent in removing “copied” videos since the beginning, with a massive public outcry when copyright infringement became the bane of a lot of lesser channels trying to cheat for more views.
It had been popular on YouTube to upload official music videos to public-owned channels back then, even though the videos were sometimes illegally downloaded to begin with. As previously reported by The Inquisitr, copyright infringement due to illegal downloading is a major issue in the United States. YouTube‘s taking down of videos and channels was a direct attempt to eliminate the issue.
In July 2011, around the time when copyright policies had started to relax a bit more, Lady Gaga’s YouTube account was suspended and promptly restored. Google, who bought YouTube in its early days, declined to comment when a notice on her channel read that it was guilty of “multiple or severe violations of YouTube‘s copyright policy.”
Do you think Lady Gaga’s loss of millions of views on YouTube will affect her fame that dramatically?
