YouTube refresh their approach to viewcounts

Not entirely unconnected with the current debate over how much money bands should get for their videos being shown on YouTube comes an announcement from the tubers that they're getting tougher with bands and others who get their viewcounts artificially inflated:

Video view counts reflect the YouTube community's interests and the grassroots popularity of videos. We periodically make changes that allow us to display consistent view counts and accurately reflect a "real" view based on video consumption, video streaming and spam filtering. Unfortunately, a few people still try to artificially manipulate their video's view counts. Some people game third-party view counts as well. That can make things unfair for everyone.

Recently, we found spamming issues associated with the view counts on a small number of videos. The inflated view count number on these videos will be frozen until actual views catch up to the published, artificial, view count. Also, a few people have commented that their view counts are updating more slowly. Occasionally the speed with which views update changes -- sometimes it’s faster and sometimes it’s slower. But we are always working to make sure that the final view count numbers are an accurate reflection of the community's interest.

In other words: hitting F5 over and over again will do you no good.

Of course, there remains a slight question over how YouTube will determine if its system is being gamed or not; you'd hope that - given these figures will be at the heart of any recompense to artists - they'll share the data upon which these decisions are taken. Otherwise it could all look a little high-handed.