Couple of interesting things here:
1) the video got made 'private' I think within a few hours of being posted, but as people have provided it through the Internet Archive you can watch it there.
2) there's been no comments or videos from that channel since. Best case, they got lawyers sicced on them for defamation or something. Worst case, they got super murdered.
3) The tldr of the issue is this company has a network of accounts making shitty, often rage-bait content which seems to be watched mostly by bots, which is in total making them the most popular (collection of) accounts of YouTube. (the journalists' proof of bots presence is that a vast majority of the accounts which comment on the videos have been set up within seconds or minutes of commenting.) Part of the response to 'why' might be to make money, the other part the authors imply is to do with political influence.
Here's the part I find extra interesting:
4) You'd think that YouTube/Google itself would be invested in learning the truth of these claims - and in stopping these channels - because they're literally handing over millions of dollars every month to these people who don't have 'real' viewers.
But of course YouTube gets its money from companies paying for advertising. Depending on how YouTube measures success for those who buy advertising, they may have little to nothing to gain from nuking a channel like this. If bots mean YouTube can report to people who buy advertising that 'a million people saw your ad', do THEY care if none of those people were real? Esp if they're not themselves making the bots, they have total plausible deniablity.
I'm just speculating there, because I don't know how that reporting is done AND I don't know how companies then measure how sales are affected by the reach of a campaign. My understanding though is that companies accept something like a 2-5% conversion rate from ad views to sales? (I could be well off with those figures, it's been a while since I've looked into that sort of thing.) Has that rate changed over time? Are companies normalising paying millions of dollars for ads which aren't getting seen by anyone?
Considering this video has been taken down, I'm curious whether YouTube is on the creator's side - exposing mis-use of their platform and a parasite draining them of cash, or if they're against the creator, for exposing them to potential advertising clients for being aware of the problem and giving them, essentially, fraudulent exposure.
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