YouTube slashes view counts for music industry heavyweights
In an surprising move, YouTube has slashed "fake" view counts for a wide variety of companies -- most notably around 2 billion for Sony and Universal Music Group channels. What does this mean? YouTube, now the number one place on the internet for music videos, is an incredibly important media outlet for artists, record labels, and music-related corporations around the globe. It's widely known that hackers can be paid to artificially increase likes or views on specific videos (a tactic called "black hat"), making them more popular and therefore gaining infinitely more exposure, ad revenue -- you name it.