1

Alex Jones, after being kicked off YouTube, has found a new home: Banned.video. And the view-counter over there seems very suspicious: it shows each video having thousands of views. And each time I refresh a video, no matter which one it is, it jumps by a few - way more than when you refresh a video on YouTube. (Here and here are two videos I found suspicious.)

Furthermore, after Infowars got kicked off YouTube, they tried using other sites such as Briteon and Bitchute, which both show their views at most in the low hundreds (barring the one or two videos linked to by the Drudge Report, which could send the video's views into the millions.) Also, considering where talking about Infowars, there's no reason to assume they wouldn't make things up to appear more popular than they are.

However, it is possible that my suspicions may be unfounded, as it does match the amount of views they used to get on YouTube when their official channel was up, or perhaps it's merely a result of their embedded videos on their site autoplaying (Infowars.com has a very high Alexa and Similarweb rating, so their site seems to be quite popular.)

So, my question is, is Banned.video's view-counter accurate? Are Alex and Infowars back to getting thousands of views? (And, it's not, how are they inflating the numbers?)

Glorfindel
  • 1,452
  • 1
  • 17
  • 28
TheAsh
  • 3,006
  • 5
  • 19
  • 41
  • 7
    How can this be answered without the source code? It seems buggy though. If I refresh the page, nothing happens, but if I press play, then immediately pause and refresh, it increments by 4. – Jerome Viveiros Oct 03 '19 at 08:35
  • 3
    @JeromeViveiros That behaviour could describe a counter on [Ajax calls](https://www.w3schools.com/xml/ajax_intro.asp) with no control of session whatsoever. IMHO is either a poorly coded counter or done on purpose. Hard to know without having access to the server side coding of that website. – bradbury9 Oct 03 '19 at 14:20
  • 2
    @JeromeViveiros i noticed the view counter pausing then jumping up by large amounts. I can think of a couple perfectly legit system designs that would have that kind of behavior. However, you're right, there's no way to answer this question without having the source code. The view counter is coming via JSON and there is no way to see what is generating that number. – DenisS Oct 03 '19 at 16:56
  • 5
    I’m unsure about the notability of this claim. Is anyone making a big deal about how many views his videos are getting on this site, or disputing that he has a large following in general? – Andrew Grimm Oct 04 '19 at 02:39
  • 2
    @AndrewGrimm I've voted to close as off topic. 1. There's no way to answer without someone from Banned.video sharing the source code. 2. Infowars was getting millions of views on Youtube and it's certainly possible that many of it's fans followed Alex Jones to Banned.video. 3. It doesn't seem like there is a notable claim here, just OP being skeptical about views on a video. – DenisS Oct 04 '19 at 14:20
  • Seems like there could be several ways to explore this, including analyzing the client-side code, recording traffic patterns to check their plausibility over time (e.g., do old videos keep getting the same hit-rate over time?; are time-of-day patterns consistent and plausible?; do their counters continue to go up while the site's down?), manually driving a large view surge to see how the counters react; simply asking them how their counters work; etc.. I mean, dunno if anyone actually cares enough to look into it, but doesn't seem fundamentally impossible. – Nat Apr 29 '20 at 18:55
  • That said, I'd personally be concerned about viewing a site like due to malware concerns. – Nat Apr 29 '20 at 18:59
  • YouTube views is not an exact metric. It's an aggregate of all platforms at any given time, calculated once a day or so. –  Apr 29 '20 at 19:07
  • @Nat That sounds like original research. There's actually no notable claim here. The question should be closed. –  Apr 29 '20 at 19:28
  • 1
    @fredsbend: Or cited research if it's done by a third party. But, yeah, skeptical anyone actually cares enough to check. – Nat Apr 29 '20 at 19:30

0 Answers0