CSS Inadvertently Implicated In Gaming Of YouTube Charts

noah | March 5, 2008 5:40 am
The above clip for Cansei de Ser Sexy’s “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” isn’t an official clip by the Brazilian glitch outfit–it was made by an Italian music blogger who decided to take some viral-video contest footage and set it to the song that was made middlingly famous by an iPod Touch ad a few months back. Somehow, the clip has become the most-watched video in the history of YouTube, racking up 89,750,739 views and overtaking the (really stupid) “Evolution Of Dance” for the top spot. Lest you think that this success is a testament to the power of Apple’s music placement, Andy Baio at waxy.org is here to let you know: The clip may have actually cheated its way to the top. No, really. This is what the world has come to, everyone.

Baio decided to look at the ratio of views to comments on the video-sharing site’s top 10 clips, and he found a surprising anomaly: “[The] CSS video has a very unusual 21,487-to-1 ratio. In other words, for every 21,487 views, someone leaves one rating. To compare, the average ratio for every other video in the top 10 is a more reasonable 590-to-1.” The video’s play count has grown exponentially over the past month, too; since February 25 it’s racked up about 25 million pageviews. (To compare, YouTube’s most popular video of the last week–the one of the Lufthansa plane bobbing from side to side–has only been played 1,662,543 times.) So it’s not hard to wonder how likely it is that those views came not from people, but YouTube-hitting bots–even if the clip’s title does have the always-popular search term “sex” smack in the middle.

Since this is an unofficial video, one can assume that if there was cheating going on, it wasn’t at the behest of the band. I’m just hoping that it was some hacker who was just sick of getting sent “Evolution Of Dance” by every one of his extended family members–at least the motivation of kicking something that really isn’t funny down the list would make this whole scam a little less silly. (But only a little.)

New Video Overtakes “Evolution Of Dance” For #1 Spot On YouTube [waxy.org] CANSEI DE SER SEXY Music is My Hot Hot Sex [YouTube]

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