Somebody is up to no good on Youtube

In 10 minutes of looking for hair shader tutorials, I have come across three new Youtube channels which each have about 100 asset store videos on them. I don't know what the deal is, but if it isn't bots it is definitely some type of spam.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0TkGrPup9XbFGon1L8Mk1g/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC66LX6gLqdq4JuJZw65eQWQ/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSMssIB2NGwBptj0b8tHMJQ/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPF-dlFfQw9sicBD6FXEthQ/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6GT1LRa8In30-q9j2bcWug/videos

something tells me there are probably a dozen of these channels created in the last 3 weeks.

 

Yup, looks like some kind of bot/script that's just scraping the store and creating a video for any that it finds. While I don't see anything illegal here (the video descriptions all link the original assets) it might cause some confusion to people when they find two videos, one from the owner and one from these accounts.

I think the only thing the original owners of the assets is to complain to YouTube. They could issue a DMCA takedown seeing as these are republishing their videos (and YouTube would shut down the channel after 3 of them) but those have to come from the original asset authors.

 

The spammers are up to no good, for sure. You can tell because they are spamming, as the tactic exposes their moral direction. What they are up to is hard to tell. It might be some kind of information scrape where they sell lists of leads to companies, or it could be more nefarious, like swapping out the asset store links in the description to websites to scrape credit cards.

They might not just be targeting Unity. Unity is all I have breathed these past few months. This might be happening for every subject on Youtube, I noticed all channels have the name "Unity" in them; this indicates they are doing it with multiple brands, and just generating names for the channels. It could be happening to all Lego videos too, I wouldn't know, because I am not looking up Legos all day online like I am Unity. So it could be a youtube wide scrape. Possibly scraping all unmonetized videos and looking to get paid from Youtube by monetizing them. If this is a bot run attack, there could be millions of these channels, and they are expecting probably all of them to be taken down, but not before youtube has unwittingly paid them a couple thousand dollars to their fly-by-night foreign accounts for the millions of views they racked up over their millions of channels. Rinse and repeat, you too can learn the secret of how I made $598 a day in passive income...

The channels were created about 8 months ago, as these bot sleeper armies usually are. They are created about 6 months to a year in advance, and then activated for a short period of time (all new accounts are automatically flagged for potential spammer on youtube and watched by the AI). these were all activated about 3 weeks ago. They are also only uploading one video per day per channel it appears.

hate spammers/scammers.

Maybe once I am done with my game Ill take a year to create a bot and spam eradicator that uses AI to drive spammers to psychological self-torture and harm, until they off themselves or drink themselves stupid and stop. They all surely share personality traits, eg weaknesses.

 

All the store links are affiliate links so they are trying to steer buyers to the store to get their 5%

 

I wonder if Unity cares. They might just see it as free marketing and search space expansion.

 

They wont mind its getting customers into their store. The only iffy side is the use of peoples videos without asking, if any of the asset authors didn't like it they can report the video to youtube, wouldn't take many reports till Youtube closed the channel but I guess its extra advertising for the assets would just be nice if they asked first. There are plenty of other Affiliate sites for Unity assets.

 

That's why they have mulitple channels. I ran across five using "Unity hair shader". You tube will only close down those with three reports, and most asset artists won't know.

But I disagree the only "iffy" part is using videos without permission. It is quite clearly spam, and spam is very rude, not to mention immoral. Bot-marketing, astro-turfing, and spam are all massive headaches for almost any internet communication platform, and costs everybody time, resources and frustration.

But I suspect Unity will not care, partly because Unity wants the money, and partly because Unity does not want the hassle of defining legitimate and illegitimate "affiliate marketing" techniques.

 

Good Idea would be putting own logo on vids, so at least people who watching it, maybe will discover that vid don't belong to the specific spammer youtuber.

 

I think most people won't care unless they are looking for support.

 

Looks like just trying to capture views from people searching for those assets.