Russ Castella VS YouTube
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Russ Castella VS YouTube
As mentioned earlier, a lot of YouTube videos have frozen views since February and YouTube is doing nothing about it but ignoring all the concerns that YouTubers express. Hundreds of messages are posted on the YouTube help section every day about this problem (this is the only way members can contact YouTube with any problems.)
One of the videos in particular, Ciara Ft. Justin Timberlake - Love Sex Magic (Russ Castella Remix), has been stuck at 47,750 since February 25, 2009.
What happened? Not sure, but take a look at the YouTube Insight chart
Russ Castella YouTube Insight Chart
As you can see, it’s all screwed up.
One of YouTube tech supports, Timmy, posted the following statement on behalf of YouTube:
March 3, 2009
Hi all,We’ve made a change in our public-facing view counts across the site that will enable us to consistently reflect what is considered a ‘view,’ based upon video consumption, video streaming and spam filtering. This only affects view counts from February 25 moving forward.
Implementing this change also caused view count updates to slow down a bit in general; many people have noticed this and we’re aware of the issue.
Thanks,
- Timmy
Almost everyone responded negatively accusing YouTube for putting out a “false statement,” specifically the line:
Implementing this change also caused view count updates to
slow down a bit
in general…
As hundreds of calls for help flooded on YouTube help desk, Russ Castella actively participated in discussions. In a recent post on YouTube community help forums Russ stated the following:
“…Speaking of Press, Im sure if someone put out mass press releases stating that YouTube has frozen views and not do anything about for more than a week will get them off their asses. Im sure there are newspapers that will pick this up in a second and Im sure YouTube doesn’t want that to happen.
…if this lasts more than 3 more days, then I’ll put it out myself. “
Russ emailed the following:
Im not attacking the fact whether YouTube made a false or legally incorrect statement. Im attacking the fact that
#1 YouTube’s incompetence with the frozen counter situation for over 12 days now. Sure this happens on myspace, but Tom quickly puts out a statement saying “YES we do know that the counters are frozen and we will fix it as soon as possible.” MySpace fixes this problem very quickly and all of the lost plays during the downtime get added to the player. Plays are not lost.
#2 YouTube’s absolute ignorance towards responding to people’s concerns. Just look at the forum, other concerns are answered, but the “frozen views” questions are systematically ignored.
Whatever. That doesn’t bother me as much. I just wonder how YouTube Partners are taking it…They get paid for each view.
-RC
One more thing. I am assuming that embeds are not getting counted. My average video gets about 50-60% of embeds. My latest video:
Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow Russ Castella Remix
2 Days…
-Scary2Spice
