A View into YouTube View Fraud-猫眼课题宝

YouTube 观看欺诈行为一探究竟

DOI：

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发表时间：

2022

期刊：

The Web Conference

影响因子：

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通讯作者：

中科院分区：

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文献类型：

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作者：

Dhruv Kuchhal;Frank Li

社交媒体平台由用户参与度指标驱动。不幸的是，这些指标很容易被操纵，并使平台暴露在滥用的风险之下。视频观看欺诈是YouTube等视频分享平台上一种独特的虚假雇佣滥用行为，视频的观看次数被人为夸大。关于这种滥用的研究有限，之前的工作集中在自动化或BOT驱动的方法上。在这篇文章中，我们探索了有机或人为驱动的观看欺诈方法，对流行的免费视频流媒体服务123Movies上运行的长期YouTube观看欺诈活动进行了案例研究。在允许123Movies用户访问该服务上的视频流之前，他们必须观看以预播广告形式显示的未经请求的YouTube视频。由于123电影的流行，这一活动推动了大规模的YouTube观看诈骗。在这项研究中，我们对123Movies如何将这些YouTube视频作为预播广告进行反向工程，并在9个月的时间内跟踪涉及的YouTube视频。对于这些视频的一个子集，我们监控他们在同一时期内各自YouTube频道的点击量和指标。我们的分析揭示了参与这一观点欺诈的YouTube渠道和视频的特征，以及此类观点欺诈努力的有效性。归根结底，我们的研究为有机YouTube观看欺诈提供了经验依据。

Social media platforms are driven by user engagement metrics. Unfortunately, such metrics are susceptible to manipulation and expose the platforms to abuse. Video view fraud is a unique class of fake engagement abuse on video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube, where the view count of videos is artificially inflated. There exists limited research on such abuse, and prior work focused on automated or bot-driven approaches. In this paper, we explore organic or human-driven approaches to view fraud, conducting a case study on a long-running YouTube view fraud campaign operated on a popular free video streaming service, 123Movies. Before 123Movies users are allowed to access a stream on the service, they must watch an unsolicited YouTube video displayed as a pre-roll advertisement. Due to 123Movies’ popularity, this activity drives large-scale YouTube view fraud. In this study, we reverse-engineer how 123Movies distributes these YouTube videos as pre-roll advertisements, and track the YouTube videos involved over a 9-month period. For a subset of these videos, we monitor their view counts and metrics for their respective YouTube channels over the same period. Our analysis reveals the characteristics of YouTube channels and videos participating in this view fraud, as well as the efficacy of such view fraud efforts. Ultimately, our study provides empirical grounding on organic YouTube view fraud.