Hey Guys, Due to a recent update at Youtube, the Honors are now even harder to achieve, in turn so are the "Most Viewed" and similar honors, with these changes in effect it's worth noting that some bots and old techniques are now ineffective. Some of these changes are : Plays from sites or embeds are no longer counted on honor awards. For instance : Video A is viewed/played 100 000 times on another web site. Video B is viewed/played 5000 times on Youtube. Video A receives 0 views to honors count. Video B receives 5000 views to honors count. Whilst video A still registers and shows 100 000 views on Youtube the total plays has no effect on the new Honor system. Videos seem to load, but wont play (sometimes) until you click Play. So I am thinking this is also to stop bots from registering plays or views - hence adding to the honors. In conclusion : Using the old embed code on a popular web site will no longer count towards the honors on Youtube, bots that only refresh the page at regular intervals may also be deemed useless for the honor system. In plain view this is an excellent tactic for Youtube, the number of sites that took advantage of the embed plays were many and now this has gone, the bots are also being ruled out. This means Youtube is back on an even playing field for producers and noobies. However : Popular niches still dominate the most played lists, like music, reality TV, sports, sex and sexy videos, this is still unfair, many of these videos are breaking the TOS and various copyright infringements are also obvious - these need to be tackled next. Then of course there's the duplicate videos, these are the videos of the exact same content that continue to clog up the "most played" lists - some days there are 5 or 6 exact same videos in the top 50 videos.
I wonder if that is why my honors have been going up? Its not really fair for videos that are posted on popular sites to grab all the honors. If you have person A and person B post an equal quality video at the same time - if person A visits a popular forum and embeds the video, its not really fair for that person to grab the awards. Leaving the people that do not spam behind in the awards ranking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYTBf20MQok #78 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - Taiwan #13 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Germany #19 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Australia #16 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Canada #17 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - United Kingdom #17 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Ireland #10 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - India #20 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - New Zealand #15 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs #19 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Spain #18 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - France #17 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Italy #21 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Japan #13 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - South Korea #37 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Netherlands #14 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Brazil #19 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Hong Kong #1 - Premium Most Viewed (Today) - People & Blogs - Taiwan #38 - Premium Most Viewed (This Week) - People & Blogs - Taiwan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cdOEeUFp5Q #62 - Premium Most Viewed (This Month) - Pets & Animals
Possibly it does mean less competition in a sense, less plays does equal more honors now. But they would still have the advantage of someone clicking the link on the player - that would still send the visitor to the video. I wonder if the new api rule changes will also have an effect .... this is stop people poaching the videos from Youtube and creating entire sites based on Youtube with 1000s of pages being created in minutes. ~~~~ Web sites like perezhilton ruled the honors for a long time by simply embedding the videos, then there was also the case recently where the most popular video of all time (evolution of dance) was knocked off by a video within a matter of months. With this case there was a lot of controversy about the methods in which they used to gain so many plays so quickly - many debated about the techniques that they/he had used - it's quite obvious that an embed on autoplay was the means of this method.