Google knowingly charging for video views by bots?

[7_Driver]

According to this article in the Guardian

[theguardian.com...]

The view counter of YouTube videos filters bot traffic more aggressively than the billing system does.

In other words - many bot views are good enough to charge advertisers for - but not good enough to add to the stat counter.

Going to be a bit tricky to defend that...

[toidi]

Hey look! Google just released brotli! Ooh ooh ooh google just released new software! Ooh ooh ooh look!

[engine]

This is a problem for everyone: Advertisers, publishers, and users. Without accurate stats, publishers and advertisers are going to lose out, and users are going to either get to have to pay for the site and service in some other way, or be fooled into thinking the site and service is more or less popular than it seems.

I don't know that anyone can defend it, but, something needs to be done to help combat this issue.