11 ms·

YouTube is littered with mass-produced videos made by automated bots

181 points by imartin2k 9y ago

pizzapill 9y ago
I've seen those videos around for a few years now. Altough the one linked in the article is of a high quality (relatively speaking). Does anybody know how to create those? I tried it with FFmpeg and espeak but never actually got anywhere fast.
- zootam 9y ago
  1. set up scrapers to get the filler content- text and video/audio 2. read text using text to speech, produce audio file 3. use a library like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy to combine them 4. auto upload to youtube 5. profit!
  - laythea 9y ago
    Its more like: 1. hope and dream of success 2. set up scrapers to get the filler content- text and video/audio 3. read text using text to speech, produce audio file 4. use a library like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy to combine them 5. auto upload to youtube 6. get depressed when you realise nobody wants to listen to a computer speak. 7. go back to day job :)
- iggg 9y ago
  I ran one of those for awhile for fun. I stopped after the demonetization epidemic where every video got demonetized. You can do a lot with ffmpeg.
- Theodores 9y ago
  I think you should make one that reads HN comment threads and extrapolates the video aspect from there.
nopressure 9y ago
What's unethical about that? It looks very clever to me. In fact I'm kinda envious because I didn't come up with that...
- sokoloff 9y ago
  I think there’s clear, intent-based copyright infringement at the very least.
  - spunker540 9y ago
    Doesn’t journalism get some sort of a pass for certain copyright infringement?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      No, although they often act like they do (e.g. using images from "social media"). You can use excerpts to comment on a work (e.g. review), but that's about it.
    - jopuwep12489 9y ago
      In most countries, journalists can use portions of copyrighted materials under fair use. For example, a science reporter could use quotes from a published study to summarize their findings. That's not the same as a bot scraping a journalist's copyrighted work in it's entirety.
    - sokoloff 9y ago
      In addition to what the peer commenters have said, I don't believe that these videos are credibly "journalism".
- gpvos 9y ago
  I can't think of any kind of ethics that would see these as a positive thing. What's possible and makes money for you isn't necessarily good. Can you explain how littering Youtube with low-quality copyright-infringing videos contributes anything to society?
option_greek 9y ago
This could be a preview to the future where content is generated on the fly by bots that gather events on their own (and hence no content ripping). At present, most of the financial content of day to day events like stock price movements is already auto generated.
eksemplar 9y ago
People still use YouTube for non specific search results? All that shows up when I try to “explore” is what could be called tabloid amateur videos, top 5-10 lists and a bunch of other shit that will quite literally waste your life as it makes you dumber. Maybe it’s my own fault for having watched the Churchill vs Roosevelt epic rap battle too many times, but nothing YouTube suggests is anywhere close to something that I won’t shut off after 5 seconds. I mean, it’s so bad I actually spent time to turn off auto play on every device I access YouTube on.
- api 9y ago
  A lot of those tabloid amateur videos are actually second and third hand copies of tabloid amateur videos created by bots. There's also a ton of bot-generated podcast spam on YouTube where bots will pull podcasts from feeds and then dress them up with cheesy video content.
- icebraining 9y ago
  If you remove a recommendation, it has a link saying "tell us why", and you can say "don't recommend me videos based on video X" (X being the video that YT used to generate that suggestion). I find YT's recommendations a bit myopic (too focused on what I've watched in the past few days), but I literally don't have any clickbait or other crap videos, it's actually pretty OK.
  - VyseofArcadia 9y ago
    Recommendations engines seem to be pretty myopic in general. Buy shoes on Amazon once, and you are a shoe aficionado. Listen to a single metal album on whatever streaming service, and that's all it'll recommend for days or weeks.
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    Oh no. You mentioned it. I've used it hundreds of times, but since "clickbait bullshit" isn't an option, there are 3 and they're pretty dumb it probably won't learn any time soon. It sometimes comes pretty close to driving me away from the service.
teddyh 9y ago
I’ve yet to see something called a “growth hack” that wasn’t unethical.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  What's funny is this article seems to have been written and promoted by a Snapzu, which literally promotes "growth hacks" on its front page.
  - apotheothesomai 9y ago
    Just because common usage allows us to call two practices "growth hacks," doesn't mean they are the same in most or even many respects. One is an automated, content stealing scheme for making easy money. The other involves techniques by which you can promote your brand through your own content. Just because you can predicate something with the same term, doesn't mean they are not very different.
    - jasonlotito 9y ago
      I was replying to a comment that said: "I’ve yet to see something called a “growth hack” that wasn’t unethical." I wasn't equating anything.
squozzer 9y ago
I found most of them too cheesy to watch for very long. What makes them fun is trying to figure out if (or where) the voice is a robot - usually child's play because robots frequently places the em-PHAS-is on the wrong syl-LAB-le. But the British butler voice isn't too shabby.
petercooper 9y ago
An article about a growth hack which is, itself, a growth hack for an email list building service :-D
nerdponx 9y ago
Who actually watches these?
- pizzapill 9y ago
  I've seen a lot of those since a couple of years. Either when searching for very recent events or Autoplay. Autoplay ones would get a full view when I'm not looking at the screen, sleeping etc.
- mrweasel 9y ago
  I watched a video just last night, regarding the F35 vs. the SAAB Gripen, it was junk, so naively I clicked on a promising title in the recommendations. The voice-over read the EXACT same script, line by line.
sago 9y ago
YT earnings up to $20 per 1k views, with $7 average? Who is earning that kind of money? The pros I know bank $1/1k (excluding sponsorships, referrals, Patreon, random demonetisations, and so on).
KhanMahGretsch 9y ago
There are also innumerable CG videos on YouTube, targeting children, which appear to be algorithmically generated. Using a combination of popular kids characters (Elsa, Spider-man, etc.) and ostensibly canned animations, the results are often strange, bizarre, and even entirely inappropriate for the intended audience. The phenomenon is referred to as "Elsagate"[0]; be forewarned, it's pure nightmare-fuel. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
- krapp 9y ago
  There is also an entire genre of children's nursery rhyme videos and toy videos which are not so obviously inappropriate, but which also have an uncanny algorithmic quality to them - I remember seeing those before I even heard of Elsagate.
  - krapp 9y ago
    Sorry for self-replying, but I remember what I was referring to now, the "Finger Family" type videos[0] particularly Toys in Japan[1] who is apparently now streaming Fortnite. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceTdz8KlYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceTdz8KlYU [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oSI23s8qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oSI23s8qw
ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may only be watched a handful of times. A few years ago I looked up their profitability and came across an article claiming they were about breaking even bringing with about a billion dollars in revenue with about a billion in costs to run the service. If anyone has any recent / real insight into this I would be grateful for a link.
- pizzapill 9y ago
  I can give you a couple insights: 300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute in 2018 A couple of years ago I've seen a Google talk with a youtube admin/engineer. He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. Money seems to never have played a role in those decisions (I can't find the link to the talk anymore). If a video gets uploaded it will be stored in multiple resolutions and formats. So a video is probably stored as ~20 files which makes the space requirements even more mind boggling.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. We had the exact same problems in the beginning of Camarades.com, before the wankers found out about it. It's amazing how for nearly 6 months it was just 'nice people' and after that it went downhill rapidly. We found out that hard way that 3 weeks lead time on a batch of servers only looks good if you don't double in size every two weeks or so :) One Dell server we ordered didn't even make it to production, it was way too small by the time it arrived so they took it back and shipped us a much larger one. That's also roughly around the time that we figured out that it is much cheaper to have one large server to do all the writes and a bunch of slaves that do all the reads from local copies. Of course a modern day server would laugh at serving up dynamic pages to a few hundred thousand people per day but in the late 90's that was quite a challenge.
    - 9y ago
mosselman 9y ago
The writer makes it seem as if society itself is at risk from being ruined because there are crappy videos on YouTube. I couldn’t care less. It is YouTube’s image that is at risk if anything and to be honest I find it super clever to generate videos like this to earn money. Very out of the box. YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited.
- laythea 9y ago
  Couldn't agree more. Same to be said for Steam, the games service.
- convexfunction 9y ago
  It seems likely that at least some of this automatically-generated content is being viewed mostly by bots. i.e., fraud.
- amelius 9y ago
  > and to be honest I find it super clever to generate videos like this to earn money. Very out of the box. I don't know. When ideas like this cross my mind, I immediately think about how they will be shut down by Google anyway, so I don't really bother. I guess in this case the bot-creator was lucky. Another point is of course that I can use my coding skills for better things.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  > YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited. You're not a parent, are you? EDIT: neither am I, for the record. But I think a lot of the replies here are a bit too quick to lay the blame on the less tech-savvy parents, who may just be using YouTube in the good faith that an app designed for children will not auto-queue disturbing content (also, the linked article makes a larger point about the "infrastructural violence" of the internet that we should not dismiss to quickly). https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
It took me a while to realise that what everyone is talking about (peppa pig / r/elsagate) and these are not AI produced videos but script kiddie stuff. The peppa pig stuff i have seen looks more like someone with one tool has been trying to make something "funny" but i suppose the point being made here is that if you can make a video for effectively free, and youtube pays you 10 bucks, you can scale that forever. surely the solution here is in how youtube pays people? Does it not have to have a bank account? Isn't it a bit weird to find thousands of channels with robo videos on it with the one bank account? i may of course be simplifying fraud detection
- Dibbles 9y ago
  There's an upload limit for Youtube, although it's 50-100 a day. You won't be guaranteed views and YT doesn't pay out that much.
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    And the upload limit only applies if you're using a single account. The big algorithmic content generators all use multiple accounts.
    - Dibbles 9y ago
      Then how do they get enough views and subscribers for monetization? More bots?
      - lifeisstillgood 9y ago
        this is what fascinates me - how do people actually monetise this stuff I was amazed to discover the Nigerian scam was a means to get money out the Western banking system - find a fool who will transfer 900,000 of a million bucks to a number somewhere and you get your stolen credit card money out the country. (see also gangs who walk down high street taking out 1000 in cash at each ATM) But this one - YouTube is paying these people. what about fraud prevention are we missing here?
JonnyNova 9y ago
A video analysis of the related phenomenon: "Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8 It talks about possibly using machine learning to create many videos targeted at toddlers and using techniques to ensure the next autoplay item doesn't change to another channel.
jgalt212 9y ago
Demand Media, 2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_Group
sbhn 9y ago
YouTube is more famous than Jesus. I tried automated videos on YouTube twice. Nobody watched them. It’s not as easy as it sounds to be successful on YouTube. Politicians using you as an example of society falling apart certainly helps to make you famous though.
John_KZ 9y ago
This is the first time he came across one of these? People have been spamming them for years and nobody watches them.
0x006A 9y ago
that page is littered with automated popups and nonsense
ryanmarsh 9y ago
Meh. Human performance follows a power law. I would only expect an ocean of garbage at the bottom and a few at the top with 80% of the total views.
Dibbles 9y ago
Haha, I made my own bot a while back ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvZs4sXbeaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvZs4sXbeaQ ). It makes videos out of wikipedia pages, so I figure it's not terrible. If you're thinking about doing such a thing, take note from me, and make sure the voice sounds okay from the beginning.
archi42 9y ago
Had something like this with a whitepaper: Someone took the PDF from our website and generated a video from it - crappy music included. That was 9 month ago. While we had some laughs, I'm a bit afraid potential customers find it and mistake it for one of ours :/

181 points by imartin2k 9y ago

I've seen those videos around for a few years now. Altough the one linked in the article is of a high quality (relatively speaking). Does anybody know how to create those? I tried it with FFmpeg and espeak but never actually got anywhere fast.

zootam 9y ago
1. set up scrapers to get the filler content- text and video/audio 2. read text using text to speech, produce audio file 3. use a library like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy to combine them 4. auto upload to youtube 5. profit!
- laythea 9y ago
  Its more like: 1. hope and dream of success 2. set up scrapers to get the filler content- text and video/audio 3. read text using text to speech, produce audio file 4. use a library like https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy https://pypi.python.org/pypi/moviepy to combine them 5. auto upload to youtube 6. get depressed when you realise nobody wants to listen to a computer speak. 7. go back to day job :)
iggg 9y ago
I ran one of those for awhile for fun. I stopped after the demonetization epidemic where every video got demonetized. You can do a lot with ffmpeg.
Theodores 9y ago
I think you should make one that reads HN comment threads and extrapolates the video aspect from there.

nopressure 9y ago

What's unethical about that? It looks very clever to me. In fact I'm kinda envious because I didn't come up with that...

sokoloff 9y ago
I think there’s clear, intent-based copyright infringement at the very least.
- spunker540 9y ago
  Doesn’t journalism get some sort of a pass for certain copyright infringement?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    No, although they often act like they do (e.g. using images from "social media"). You can use excerpts to comment on a work (e.g. review), but that's about it.
  - jopuwep12489 9y ago
    In most countries, journalists can use portions of copyrighted materials under fair use. For example, a science reporter could use quotes from a published study to summarize their findings. That's not the same as a bot scraping a journalist's copyrighted work in it's entirety.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    In addition to what the peer commenters have said, I don't believe that these videos are credibly "journalism".
gpvos 9y ago
I can't think of any kind of ethics that would see these as a positive thing. What's possible and makes money for you isn't necessarily good. Can you explain how littering Youtube with low-quality copyright-infringing videos contributes anything to society?

option_greek 9y ago

This could be a preview to the future where content is generated on the fly by bots that gather events on their own (and hence no content ripping). At present, most of the financial content of day to day events like stock price movements is already auto generated.

eksemplar 9y ago

People still use YouTube for non specific search results? All that shows up when I try to “explore” is what could be called tabloid amateur videos, top 5-10 lists and a bunch of other shit that will quite literally waste your life as it makes you dumber. Maybe it’s my own fault for having watched the Churchill vs Roosevelt epic rap battle too many times, but nothing YouTube suggests is anywhere close to something that I won’t shut off after 5 seconds. I mean, it’s so bad I actually spent time to turn off auto play on every device I access YouTube on.

api 9y ago
A lot of those tabloid amateur videos are actually second and third hand copies of tabloid amateur videos created by bots. There's also a ton of bot-generated podcast spam on YouTube where bots will pull podcasts from feeds and then dress them up with cheesy video content.
icebraining 9y ago
If you remove a recommendation, it has a link saying "tell us why", and you can say "don't recommend me videos based on video X" (X being the video that YT used to generate that suggestion). I find YT's recommendations a bit myopic (too focused on what I've watched in the past few days), but I literally don't have any clickbait or other crap videos, it's actually pretty OK.
- VyseofArcadia 9y ago
  Recommendations engines seem to be pretty myopic in general. Buy shoes on Amazon once, and you are a shoe aficionado. Listen to a single metal album on whatever streaming service, and that's all it'll recommend for days or weeks.
- solarkraft 9y ago
  Oh no. You mentioned it. I've used it hundreds of times, but since "clickbait bullshit" isn't an option, there are 3 and they're pretty dumb it probably won't learn any time soon. It sometimes comes pretty close to driving me away from the service.

teddyh 9y ago

I’ve yet to see something called a “growth hack” that wasn’t unethical.

jasonlotito 9y ago
What's funny is this article seems to have been written and promoted by a Snapzu, which literally promotes "growth hacks" on its front page.
- apotheothesomai 9y ago
  Just because common usage allows us to call two practices "growth hacks," doesn't mean they are the same in most or even many respects. One is an automated, content stealing scheme for making easy money. The other involves techniques by which you can promote your brand through your own content. Just because you can predicate something with the same term, doesn't mean they are not very different.
  - jasonlotito 9y ago
    I was replying to a comment that said: "I’ve yet to see something called a “growth hack” that wasn’t unethical." I wasn't equating anything.

squozzer 9y ago

I found most of them too cheesy to watch for very long. What makes them fun is trying to figure out if (or where) the voice is a robot - usually child's play because robots frequently places the em-PHAS-is on the wrong syl-LAB-le. But the British butler voice isn't too shabby.

petercooper 9y ago

An article about a growth hack which is, itself, a growth hack for an email list building service :-D

nerdponx 9y ago

Who actually watches these?

pizzapill 9y ago
I've seen a lot of those since a couple of years. Either when searching for very recent events or Autoplay. Autoplay ones would get a full view when I'm not looking at the screen, sleeping etc.
mrweasel 9y ago
I watched a video just last night, regarding the F35 vs. the SAAB Gripen, it was junk, so naively I clicked on a promising title in the recommendations. The voice-over read the EXACT same script, line by line.

sago 9y ago

YT earnings up to $20 per 1k views, with $7 average? Who is earning that kind of money? The pros I know bank $1/1k (excluding sponsorships, referrals, Patreon, random demonetisations, and so on).

KhanMahGretsch 9y ago

There are also innumerable CG videos on YouTube, targeting children, which appear to be algorithmically generated. Using a combination of popular kids characters (Elsa, Spider-man, etc.) and ostensibly canned animations, the results are often strange, bizarre, and even entirely inappropriate for the intended audience. The phenomenon is referred to as "Elsagate"[0]; be forewarned, it's pure nightmare-fuel. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

krapp 9y ago
There is also an entire genre of children's nursery rhyme videos and toy videos which are not so obviously inappropriate, but which also have an uncanny algorithmic quality to them - I remember seeing those before I even heard of Elsagate.
- krapp 9y ago
  Sorry for self-replying, but I remember what I was referring to now, the "Finger Family" type videos[0] particularly Toys in Japan[1] who is apparently now streaming Fortnite. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceTdz8KlYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NceTdz8KlYU [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oSI23s8qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_oSI23s8qw

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago

I find it fascinating how YouTube can afford to keep storing so much data, at the rate it comes in and especially when most if it is not valuable and may only be watched a handful of times. A few years ago I looked up their profitability and came across an article claiming they were about breaking even bringing with about a billion dollars in revenue with about a billion in costs to run the service. If anyone has any recent / real insight into this I would be grateful for a link.

pizzapill 9y ago
I can give you a couple insights: 300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute in 2018 A couple of years ago I've seen a Google talk with a youtube admin/engineer. He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. Money seems to never have played a role in those decisions (I can't find the link to the talk anymore). If a video gets uploaded it will be stored in multiple resolutions and formats. So a video is probably stored as ~20 files which makes the space requirements even more mind boggling.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > He said that in the beginning they had huge issues because they could not order servers fast enough for the demand. We had the exact same problems in the beginning of Camarades.com, before the wankers found out about it. It's amazing how for nearly 6 months it was just 'nice people' and after that it went downhill rapidly. We found out that hard way that 3 weeks lead time on a batch of servers only looks good if you don't double in size every two weeks or so :) One Dell server we ordered didn't even make it to production, it was way too small by the time it arrived so they took it back and shipped us a much larger one. That's also roughly around the time that we figured out that it is much cheaper to have one large server to do all the writes and a bunch of slaves that do all the reads from local copies. Of course a modern day server would laugh at serving up dynamic pages to a few hundred thousand people per day but in the late 90's that was quite a challenge.
  - 9y ago

mosselman 9y ago

The writer makes it seem as if society itself is at risk from being ruined because there are crappy videos on YouTube. I couldn’t care less. It is YouTube’s image that is at risk if anything and to be honest I find it super clever to generate videos like this to earn money. Very out of the box. YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited.

laythea 9y ago
Couldn't agree more. Same to be said for Steam, the games service.
convexfunction 9y ago
It seems likely that at least some of this automatically-generated content is being viewed mostly by bots. i.e., fraud.
amelius 9y ago
> and to be honest I find it super clever to generate videos like this to earn money. Very out of the box. I don't know. When ideas like this cross my mind, I immediately think about how they will be shut down by Google anyway, so I don't really bother. I guess in this case the bot-creator was lucky. Another point is of course that I can use my coding skills for better things.
vanderZwan 9y ago
> YouTube is just a service that is out to make money out of bored and media-addicted people. It isn’t a public service that is being exploited. You're not a parent, are you? EDIT: neither am I, for the record. But I think a lot of the replies here are a bit too quick to lay the blame on the less tech-savvy parents, who may just be using YouTube in the good faith that an app designed for children will not auto-queue disturbing content (also, the linked article makes a larger point about the "infrastructural violence" of the internet that we should not dismiss to quickly). https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

lifeisstillgood 9y ago

It took me a while to realise that what everyone is talking about (peppa pig / r/elsagate) and these are not AI produced videos but script kiddie stuff. The peppa pig stuff i have seen looks more like someone with one tool has been trying to make something "funny" but i suppose the point being made here is that if you can make a video for effectively free, and youtube pays you 10 bucks, you can scale that forever. surely the solution here is in how youtube pays people? Does it not have to have a bank account? Isn't it a bit weird to find thousands of channels with robo videos on it with the one bank account? i may of course be simplifying fraud detection

Dibbles 9y ago
There's an upload limit for Youtube, although it's 50-100 a day. You won't be guaranteed views and YT doesn't pay out that much.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  And the upload limit only applies if you're using a single account. The big algorithmic content generators all use multiple accounts.
  - Dibbles 9y ago
    Then how do they get enough views and subscribers for monetization? More bots?
    - lifeisstillgood 9y ago
      this is what fascinates me - how do people actually monetise this stuff I was amazed to discover the Nigerian scam was a means to get money out the Western banking system - find a fool who will transfer 900,000 of a million bucks to a number somewhere and you get your stolen credit card money out the country. (see also gangs who walk down high street taking out 1000 in cash at each ATM) But this one - YouTube is paying these people. what about fraud prevention are we missing here?

JonnyNova 9y ago

A video analysis of the related phenomenon: "Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8 It talks about possibly using machine learning to create many videos targeted at toddlers and using techniques to ensure the next autoplay item doesn't change to another channel.

jgalt212 9y ago

Demand Media, 2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_Group

sbhn 9y ago

YouTube is more famous than Jesus. I tried automated videos on YouTube twice. Nobody watched them. It’s not as easy as it sounds to be successful on YouTube. Politicians using you as an example of society falling apart certainly helps to make you famous though.

John_KZ 9y ago

This is the first time he came across one of these? People have been spamming them for years and nobody watches them.

0x006A 9y ago

that page is littered with automated popups and nonsense

ryanmarsh 9y ago

Meh. Human performance follows a power law. I would only expect an ocean of garbage at the bottom and a few at the top with 80% of the total views.

Dibbles 9y ago

Haha, I made my own bot a while back ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvZs4sXbeaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvZs4sXbeaQ ). It makes videos out of wikipedia pages, so I figure it's not terrible. If you're thinking about doing such a thing, take note from me, and make sure the voice sounds okay from the beginning.

archi42 9y ago

Had something like this with a whitepaper: Someone took the PDF from our website and generated a video from it - crappy music included. That was 9 month ago. While we had some laughs, I'm a bit afraid potential customers find it and mistake it for one of ours :/