14 DAY TRIAL // For many of the past years, Google has been charging YouTube advertisers for ad impressions shown on videos accessed by bots.
Seven researchers from universities across Europe carried out a series of tests that showed that Google's advertising tools are seriously out of sync with YouTube's bot detection system.
The experiment consisted of three main stages. At first, developers created videos and uploaded them to YouTube.
In the second stage, they bought ads using Google's AdWords program and then set up the ads to be delivered only on their videos.
During the third stage, they then created simple programmatic bots, which would load the YouTube page and then play the video.
YouTube's bot detection works better than AdWords' bot detection
After testing their research on four separate videos in different scenarios for eight days, the researchers observed that, while YouTube's public video views counter was showing one value, the counter in the AdWords campaign was showing another one, much higher than the previously mentioned one.
This meant that Google was charging its AdWords clients that advertised on YouTube for ad impressions shown to bots, and the company was well aware of this.
| YouTube views counter | AdWords views counter | |
|---|---|---|
| Video 1 | 18 | 31 |
| Video 2 | 7 | 60 |
| Video 3 | 147 | 178 |
| Video 4 | 0 | 15 (17 when repeated) |
The research did show that Google was not charging for the whole number of bot views, but only for a fraction, and also that, when the video was pulled down for suspicious activity, the ad impressions for that particular video would also be taken out of the advertiser's bill.
The study was also carried out on similar platforms, and YouTube's bot detection system was head and shoulders above the ones employed by its competitors like Dailymotion.
More details about the researcher's work can be found in their paper entitled "Understanding the detection of fake view fraud in video content portals."