Hey everyone,
We get frequent questions about people's subscriber and view count fluctuating. People see us respond that YouTube frequently purges bots and this happens to everyone. But sometimes that answer feels a little "insufficient". I wanted to take a moment to provide a bit more detail on what is happening.
First, what is a bot? These are programs designed to do something automatically. The bots that target YouTube are typically "ad bots" or "malware bots" and are trying to drive people to click on links to either (1) drive ad "click" revenue, (2) install malware, or (3) advertise a product or service (CBD and supplements are common). There are many other types of bots, but these are the most active ones on YouTube.
How do they work? Well, the bot owner creates a YouTube account for the bot. They usually put up a few videos (usually stolen, or content pointing to products or malware) and do a basic customization of the channel. They then have the bot scan around and post links to the comments section of a channel's videos. They may also subscribe and set a notification on that channel so that the bot can add its comment to any new videos that are posted. That means when a bot scans your channel, it registers as a "view" of your video. It also means it may be artificially increasing your subscriber number.
Most bot owners don't just run one bot at a time. They run many, sometimes hundreds or thousands at a time. They do this because they realize there is only a small amount of time before either the bot's account is reported for SPAM, or YouTube's system catches it. What is important to know is that YouTube will always eventually catch the bots. When they do, they purge the bots. Doing so removes the bot's channel, any comments the bot has posted, any views the bot has performed and any subscriptions the bot had registered. YouTube can use their very sophisticated machine learning tools to identify multiple bots from the behavior of one bot, so often they are removing thousands, if not tens of thousands of bots at a time.
This impacts you. It would be very rare for you to get activity from only one bot. Usually the same technique used to find your channel is shared across bots, so you are very likely to be hit by multiple bots from the same "bad guy". While this happens to everyone, removing 50 views from a channel with 100,000 views is small, but removing 50 views from a channel with 200 views is big. Likewise, removing 20 subs from a channel with 5000 subs is small, but removing 20 subs from a channel with 100 subs is a big deal.
How can you help reduce the problem? First, the bots won't bother with you if they can't post to your comments. Ensuring you have the setting turned on that prevents the posting of URLs is a great way to reduce bot activity. You may still get some views from bots, but you aren't likely to get subs from bots if they can't post to your comments. Likewise you can setup word filters that prevent comments with common SPAM phrases like CBD, sub4sub, hug4hug, supplement, etc.
I hope this helps! If you see someone post a question about subs and views being removed, point them to this post for an explanation.
We get frequent questions about people's subscriber and view count fluctuating. People see us respond that YouTube frequently purges bots and this happens to everyone. But sometimes that answer feels a little "insufficient". I wanted to take a moment to provide a bit more detail on what is happening.
First, what is a bot? These are programs designed to do something automatically. The bots that target YouTube are typically "ad bots" or "malware bots" and are trying to drive people to click on links to either (1) drive ad "click" revenue, (2) install malware, or (3) advertise a product or service (CBD and supplements are common). There are many other types of bots, but these are the most active ones on YouTube.
How do they work? Well, the bot owner creates a YouTube account for the bot. They usually put up a few videos (usually stolen, or content pointing to products or malware) and do a basic customization of the channel. They then have the bot scan around and post links to the comments section of a channel's videos. They may also subscribe and set a notification on that channel so that the bot can add its comment to any new videos that are posted. That means when a bot scans your channel, it registers as a "view" of your video. It also means it may be artificially increasing your subscriber number.
Most bot owners don't just run one bot at a time. They run many, sometimes hundreds or thousands at a time. They do this because they realize there is only a small amount of time before either the bot's account is reported for SPAM, or YouTube's system catches it. What is important to know is that YouTube will always eventually catch the bots. When they do, they purge the bots. Doing so removes the bot's channel, any comments the bot has posted, any views the bot has performed and any subscriptions the bot had registered. YouTube can use their very sophisticated machine learning tools to identify multiple bots from the behavior of one bot, so often they are removing thousands, if not tens of thousands of bots at a time.
This impacts you. It would be very rare for you to get activity from only one bot. Usually the same technique used to find your channel is shared across bots, so you are very likely to be hit by multiple bots from the same "bad guy". While this happens to everyone, removing 50 views from a channel with 100,000 views is small, but removing 50 views from a channel with 200 views is big. Likewise, removing 20 subs from a channel with 5000 subs is small, but removing 20 subs from a channel with 100 subs is a big deal.
How can you help reduce the problem? First, the bots won't bother with you if they can't post to your comments. Ensuring you have the setting turned on that prevents the posting of URLs is a great way to reduce bot activity. You may still get some views from bots, but you aren't likely to get subs from bots if they can't post to your comments. Likewise you can setup word filters that prevent comments with common SPAM phrases like CBD, sub4sub, hug4hug, supplement, etc.
I hope this helps! If you see someone post a question about subs and views being removed, point them to this post for an explanation.
