In the last couple of weeks Barack Obama’s YouTube numbers have absolutely skyrocketed. With over 2,700,000 views of Obama's channel as of this writing, he has almost 35 times the number of views as Hillary Clinton, who comes in second at over 78,000 (in the last couple of days Obama's numbers seemed to stopped climbing completely -- has YouTube capped the number of views?) and his number of views have risen by almost 2000% in the last week. While we know that Obama is enjoying more support online than any other candidate and expect higher numbers on YouTube, these numbers are all out of proportion. Either Obama has left Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the dust or YouTube's new YouChoose channel, which they launched earlier this month and which we think is a terrific innovation, is getting pwned (Translation: beware of those channel stats until further notice).

We're looking at two separate numbers here: the number of "channel" views and the number of "video" views. Each candidate's "channel" is their landing page on YouTube. Every time someone visits that channel, another "view" is added to its number of views.  Every time we watch a single video a "view" is added to that video, not the channel.  So far Obama's channel has over 2,700,000 views, and his videos have been viewed a total of about 650,000 times.

There are a few reasons why the high number of channel views looks fishy. First, the total number of views of Obama's individual videos is nowhere near the total number of channel views. When you first load the channel a video automatically plays, which may or may not contribute to that video’s total views (the relationship between channel and video views is sketchy, though we’re told by sources at YouTube it should be cleared up soon). But if we take the total number of video views as accurate this means that only about 24% of visitors to his video-sharing web site are actually watching videos, while over 2 million people are visiting the channel but not watching any videos.

Second, it appears that there’s a way to game the system. Last fall a social networking news site called Mashable published a post about "Gaming YouTube for Fun and Profit," in which they described how to artificially increase the number of video views on YouTube. Essentially, if you set your browser to auto-refresh a YouTube page (a Firefox extension does it), every time the browser refreshes the video has a new view added to it. To try this out, I made a video of myself discussing this very problem, uploaded it to YouTube, and set my browser to auto-refresh every 10 seconds for 12 hours. Although I expected to see the number of views rise above 4,000 (every 10 seconds X 12 hours), it got stuck somewhere around 280 views, and are now over 1200 views. While the increased number of views doesn’t always appear right away, and doesn’t always correspond to the number of refreshes, it is still possible to to artificially inflate the number.

Unless 1200 people happened to see a video I didn’t promote and tagged with the word “technology,” I gamed the system. Now imagine several people dedicated to doing this full-time to promote a presidential candidate…

Third, the ratio of subscribers-to-viewers is out of whack. TechPresident reader Robert Ruszkowski (and Dennis Kucinich supporter) emailed us saying that the number of subscribers to Obama’s channel hasn’t risen along with his channel views:

When Obama had only 100,000 channel views [around March 17] he had approx 3100 channel Members (= 3.1 Members per 1,000 channel views. This was before the huge spike in his channel views. After the spike at the 2,000,000 channel view mark (20X the number) he had approx 3,600 channel Members (= .18 members per 1,000 channel views ). If he had maintained the 3.1 Members for 1,000 channel view mark his total number of members at this point would have been around 62,000 not 3,600. At the 2,600,000 channel view mark he only had 3650 members. That’s only 50 members added for over 600,000 channel views. That appox. 12,000 channel views to add just one new member. If you use the original 3.1 new members per 1,000 channel views that held true before the huge spike in views the true number of Barack Obama Channel views would be around 177,419 instead of 2,600,000.

If someone is artificially inflating the numbers, it's a violation of YouTube's TOS ("You agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, 'robots,' 'spiders,' 'offline readers,' etc., that accesses the Website in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser."). As far as we can tell the number of individual video views is accurate.

When asked for a response about these funny numbers, a YouTube spokesperson said, "At YouTube we are continuously improving the product to provide accurate view, rating and subscription numbers. We are developing safeguards to secure the statistics on YouTube and
are looking into this matter."

So far the Obama campaign has no comment on this.

In light of all this, we suggest you take our Views chart with a huge grain of salt.  Stay tuned for updates on that front.