So apparantly avril Lavigne’s ‘Band aids’ have become enraged that Avril’s ‘Girlfriend’ video is not in the most watched music video of all time.
“Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend music video is less than 1 million views away from becoming the most watched video of all time on YouTube, so if ever there was a time for us to bring back the YouTube campaign, that time is now!
“But making Girlfriend the most watched video on YouTube is small potatoes compared to what we’re capable of. We’re going to make Girlfriend the first ever video on YouTube to have over 100,000,000 views…
“…what we’re attempting won’t be easy but…. Bahh who am I kidding? Of course it will be easy because we have a secret weapon.”
Yeah. They have a bot. It ads a pageview to the video every 15 seconds. Her video currently has 89 000 000 pageviews.
So. Do SleepingUnderTheSubwoofer and the rest of the world a little favour. Sit through an amazingly awesome vid. all will enjoy….
Presenting: youtube’s number 1 watched video :
June 28, 2008 at 8:07 am
Dear Media,
I usually don’t like to brag until after the war has officially been won, but some sites have already blown my cover, so I am without the luxury of waiting.
On June 19th, Bandaids launched a YouTube Viewer with the intention of making Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend the Most Watched Video of all time on YouTube. In the time that the Viewer was running, it recorded 1.2 million loads of Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend video page on YouTube.
Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, Wired.com, The Globe and Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, TMF, and hundreds of other media outlets around the world picked up on the story resulting in quite the frenzy. Some praised the campaign saying, “It’s the kind of view-gaming that advertisers would normally consider fraud — that is, if what the fans were doing wasn’t better than the best advertising Lavigne and her label RCA could buy.” Others… okay, the majority… just called us dirty old cheaters.
But like a magician revealing the M.O. to a convincing trick, I have to admit that Bandaids’ YouTube Campaign was nothing but misdirection. Bandaiders didn’t cheat: the YouTube Viewer was a Hoax.
All along, I knew that YouTube capped the number of views added to a video at 200 per IP address per day. As such, the only way to make Girlfriend the most watched video on YouTube the fast way was to increase our reach, not our views per person. And the best way to do that was to use viral marketing to tap into traditional news sources. So our members went about inflating the count on the YouTube Viewer and spreading the link around the net.
In the mean time, the real end game of the campaign was unfolding nicely. As media outlets around the world began accusing Bandaids of cheating Avril’s way into the record books, they drove thousands upon thousands of curious folks to watch Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend video on YouTube (yes, even you Perez). This resulted in a much larger boost to Avril’s view count than Bandaids could ever have generated on its own.
Don’t believe me? When the Viewer launched on June 19th, Girlfriend had amassed 88.0 million views on its own merits. On June 24th when the viewer was retired, Girlfriend had 88.9 million views – an increase largely on pace with what Girlfriend had been steadily gaining in the past few months. At best, Bandaids’ YouTube Viewer added under 100,000 (legitimate, as per YouTube’s terms of service) views to Girlfriend’s total view count. The only thing we cheated was hundreds of reporters into doing our promo for us.
At current count, Girlfriend is 732,892 views away from becoming the most watched video of all time on YouTube. And when it does clinch first place, it won’t be because of Bandaids, it will be because Avril Lavigne wrote an irresistible song and recorded a damn good video for it. We’re just here to help Avril get the publicity she deserves.
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Avril Lavigne Fansite Owner,
Sharifa xx
June 28, 2008 at 8:26 pm
….you kids have no life…
.I love how so much feindish effort went into plottingsomething so trivial. You’re almost as bad as MCR’s emo Drones.
Go graduate high school and start contributing to society.
July 29, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Its really not too hard to figure out once you see the statistics from the TubeMogul video stats tracking servive. If you can analyze graph data, you can see as clearly as youtube does: The announcement of that page did not result in an unnatural increase in views. You can load Girlfriend alongside Evolution of Dance and see that Girlfriend has always had better numbers except for a few days here and there.
Basically what people have to learn to accept is that she has a young fanbase with a lot more free time, and she has a lot of people who hate her that have nothing better to do than visit the video page just to insult her, the video, and those who watch it. THAT more than any other explanation seems far more probable than fans coming up with a way to cheat youtube that none of the millions of other users there could think of, and then announce they will use it on a public forum, risking everyone in the world finding out about it.
Speculation and hearsay can be debated all year round, but the statistical data is the best evidence that shows the page never worked, and so we can thank people who don’t like her adding enough views to push her to #1 :)
August 26, 2008 at 4:59 pm
That would be sweet to go see Avril Lavigne in concert in Beijing China. Her tour date says it’s October 6th. After watching the olympics, I really want to visit Beijing now.