YouTube just cleaned house again, this time by purging 2.5 billion views from the Universal Music Group channel. Now all that's left are 582,000 views.
This isn't the first time it's happened, according to The Daily Dot. In February, YouTube cleared more than 3 billion views from the channel, and the label wasn't too pleased about it, saying the channels were "largely dormant."
According to The Dot, YouTube refused to comment on the sweep, but reporter Chase Hoffeberger believes it has something to do with view-botting, or basically what happens when someone plunks down $60 or so to buy a few thousand views from a company like Pimp My Viral or ViralShowPR. It's like porn bots for Twitter but for YouTube views.
YouTube actually bans this practice—check its terms of service, TOS item, Section H—so it makes sense that the company doesn't want to admit all this view-botting has been happening under its watch. Although it's interesting to note the which artists' videos were purged: Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and ... Razko2, to name a few.
