actually, i have a mild hypothesis with this and it flips it around.

perhaps they're only counting featured track (they call it a "trailer" and promote it as "increasing subscribers", but subscribers are useless because nobody reads their feed - it's a featured track) plays if the user does run an adblock or flashblock type program. that way, the user is physically initiating the play.

that would explain why i'm only getting 30-50% of the actual hits - the rest of it is autoplaying. you can't turn the autoplay off, unfortunately.

therefore, you should install adblock.

although, i just tested one of the tracks under 300 with an embed (meaning i'm not signed in through it) and it didn't increment immediately like it ought to, indicating there's something deeper happening.

you'll see me on the street corner in five years yelling:

"i got 100,000 views but they didn't count them!"

while people toss quarters at me and tell me to shut up.

but, seriously. there's something really seriously wrong with the counter. i haven't seen hits on hardly anything in three or four days, but i know i'm getting upwards of a hundred visitors a day. it's not adding up...

if i were to get conspiratorial, i wouldn't blame it on my politics. there's no logical connection between my hit count and my rambling. that is, decreasing my hit count isn't going to stop me from rambling, and it has nothing to do with the reach of the videos i'm rambling on. if somebody is trying to shut me up by cutting out my hit count, they're completely incompetent.

if i was to get conspiratorial, it would have more to do with the fact that i'm NOT buying hits or paying for advertising. i have a hypothesis that it's ultimately google that's selling the hits, not some script kiddies. being able to generate traffic without buying into their system (via buying ads or buying hits) threatens their business model. i may have been flagged when i crossed some threshold, like 10,000 hits, maybe. i wouldn't put it above them.

but i can't shake occam's razor, and it's just that the counters are programmed badly. no matter how enticing the second conspiratorial option is, and no matter how much the circumstantial evidence leans that way, incompetence is simply a simpler explanation.

as mentioned, i can't let that get to me, no matter how irritating it is. i know i'm generating traffic. there's nothing for sale on youtube - that traffic needs to be routed to bandcamp for me to get anywhere with it. there's no chance i'm going to force somebody to watch an ad to listen to the song; the whole point is *i'm* advertising something, i don't want to give somebody else the space, that would defeat the purpose. and, i'm not going to generate this kind of traffic much of anywhere else. if they're going to throttle me, it just means it'll take longer to get to where i need the hit counts to be to generate that distribution interest. but, my argument relies on the hits eventually adding up, anyways. requiring six months rather than three is relatively irrelevant - i need total hits. so, i just need to forget about it and be patient....

i just hope it *is* incompetence - because if it's not, it still is.

and that's far more frightening than a bunch of bad programming.

as i mentioned before, though, i'm going to be pissed if i get a negative growth curve from july to august as a result of this, considering i know that i'm generating increased traffic. i had a nice curve going on there.

and, what if it's a ploy? a sales trick? see, i bet google has an army of psychiatrists working for them...

what if they key on users that are generating hits, then take those hits away in the hopes that it will coerce them into buying advertising? what if they even inflate the hit counts with the desire of building a sort of addiction to the metrics? the first hit's free, then we start charging.

i've been clear in the past that i can't buy advertising. the music is far too abstract. i mean, i probably wouldn't anyways - i'm both remarkably cheap and far too idealistic. but, i know it's not going to work. what i'm doing is far more effective.

but, that's kind of the point. i'm breaking their system...

see, i might be breaking their system, but it's not the case that just anybody could do this. i don't really pose them a threat.

first of all, this is a full time job. the sheer amount of posting i'm doing is not really feasible for most people. second, it requires some serious talent, which in this case reduces to intelligence. i'm a realist, and it's the truth of it - you need a brain to troll like this. it's an art. so, if you put those two things together, you're looking at a pay rate considerably over minimum wage and a difficult and expensive recruiting process attached to it. nike or coca cola or whatever can't just hire some high school kids to do this. they'd really have to headhunt.

it's consequently not feasible to adopt as a model. could some other individuals pull it off? sure. and you can't stop them, either. but i'm not a threat to ad revenue.

so, like, back off.

but, on a larger scale, i think the world needs to get ready for something: the trolls will inherit the earth. in the last generation, it was the nerds. everybody hated them and looked down on them, but they became the most successful gen xers. in the future, expect the trolls to overcome.

wait for it.

in that sense, maybe i'm blazing a path....

 ....but this is too specialized to replace traditional advertising, and it's not what consumers want, either. it may generate traffic, but it would hurt sales, for most companies.

i mean, the crux of what i'm doing is three-fold :

1) piss people off. then they have to listen - and in an agitated state, where they're likely to respond. companies won't want to do this, obviously.
2) say something controversial that pisses off most people but is exactly what somebody else wants to say and is afraid to say because it will piss off most people. that works for obscure artists that are going to build fan bases off the solidarity, but it's almost always a bad idea for a company to take a stand like this.
3) provoke thought. which is again counter-intuitive for selling a product, but good for distributing art.

so, even if the odd company can find a trolling genius, and is willing to pay her, what she can actually do for the company is quite limited. and consumers will quickly grow tired of it.

there's also a saturation point inherent to the process of trolling that trolls need to be wary of. i can troll at will right now because nobody knows who i am. even a company that might be willing to be antagonistic with it's product, like sony or nintendo, can't do that. if the logo is visible, it's just an ad. if it isn't, it's deceptive - and will backfire.

so, you have to go back to the determined individual. with enough time and hard work some other person with the smarts could do this, maybe better than me. but we're rare. 1 in some big number, anyways.

....and not a threat.