Unethical growth hacks: A look into the growing Youtube news bot epidemic
Found on Hackernoon on Saturday, 14 April 2018
Someone has effectively created a fully automated process running 24/7 that is taking and stripping recent articles, converting them into video format, and posting it on Youtube as their own. And while doing so, they take credit for it and reap all the rewards — such as revenue and influence — that come with it.
Because these are video format, they often get preferred treatment in Google’s search results, as it helps their search results seem more diverse when including video, images, and other non-link content.
You have to exclude youtube from searches anyway, because too much useless results are messing them up. Not necessarily bot-generated content, but pointless junk like recording text typed into notepad.exe to explain something. That's what html is for.