BOOST
We Love Competition.
Hypothesis:Video contest view counts are being inflated by the participants.
Analysis: Record and visualize view count data.
Conclusion: Yes: People are "cheating" making view counts an irrelevant metric.
A Little Backstory
You probably don't care about Doritos—or their multi-million dollar contest—at least not as much as we do. For us, it all started when we uploaded our 30 second ad spot to Doritos' Crash the Super Bowl website. After a day it was approved and went live on the site. We immediately jumped into the hard work of promoting our spot to the world. Within the first week, ours become the 4th most viewed Doritos ad on the site. Pretty cool.
But along the way we noticed something odd. While the view counts for our own ad steadily climbed, we began seeing a more sporadic pattern in the view counts of a handful of the other top videos—large periods of stagnation followed by a significant burst of views. We wondered: Could it be as simple as merely clicking the video in quick succession? We dove into some highly controlled and scientific sluething (read: we clicked on a single video a "whole buncha times".) We were surprised when it actually pumped up the views by the hundreds, and thought it would be neat to track the top ranked videos in order to visualize this "cheater" behavior.
Before we move on, it should be made clear that view counts most likely bear zero weight on winner selection (though there no doubt exists a corollary between high view count and social attention). Many entrants are repudiating claims of participating in boosting. We wonder if this very fact is the reason why the boosting behavior has become so fascinating to us.
So, what did we learn? Choose a video below and find out for yourself.
