My first response to a statement like "youtube views are down across the board" is that Google is being more effective at catching ad fraud. Just recently we had the "$5M a day ad fraud story" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219871) on video ad fraud.
Ad fraud is prevalent because it is the perfect "victimless" crime. If you build a system that defrauds advertisers the ad platform won't prosecute you because they don't want to admit to the fraud, they will just figure out how to detect and block you. They might try to take back money but there are lots of ways to move money through the banking system so that you get to keep most (if not all) of it. There are billions of dollars in play so stealing .01% is profitable and essentially "noise" to the players. And everything is already set up to automatically send money around so you never have to meet face to face. As one person put it, "It's a giant money of river flowing right by your doorstep, you're telling me you won't step out and dip your cup into it now and then to pick up some walking around money?"
The effect of Google being more effective was they massively suppressed the ad revenue from things like AdSense for content which both made legitimate small scale sites no longer even making beer money, and the required infrastructure to defraud AdSense a bit more expensive.
YouTube has been trying to get profitable for years, and they are trying to get more advertisers on it, and it has a huge click/view fraud problem (as evidenced by the Forbes article and elsewhere). So if they clean it of viewbots then views will likely "go down across the board."
Ad fraud is prevalent because it is the perfect "victimless" crime. If you build a system that defrauds advertisers the ad platform won't prosecute you because they don't want to admit to the fraud, they will just figure out how to detect and block you. They might try to take back money but there are lots of ways to move money through the banking system so that you get to keep most (if not all) of it. There are billions of dollars in play so stealing .01% is profitable and essentially "noise" to the players. And everything is already set up to automatically send money around so you never have to meet face to face. As one person put it, "It's a giant money of river flowing right by your doorstep, you're telling me you won't step out and dip your cup into it now and then to pick up some walking around money?"
The effect of Google being more effective was they massively suppressed the ad revenue from things like AdSense for content which both made legitimate small scale sites no longer even making beer money, and the required infrastructure to defraud AdSense a bit more expensive.
YouTube has been trying to get profitable for years, and they are trying to get more advertisers on it, and it has a huge click/view fraud problem (as evidenced by the Forbes article and elsewhere). So if they clean it of viewbots then views will likely "go down across the board."