Measurement

What a verified view is

A view is what a platform reports, counted by rules each platform publishes itself. A verified view is what survives once you check the account that produced it, which is a different and considerably smaller number. On a real campaign the gap between those two numbers is between ten and forty per cent, and it is the only part of the reporting worth arguing about.

What the check actually tests

Not the view. The account, and the shape of the curve it produced.

A single view carries almost no information, so verification looks at the posting account and at the shape of the curve it produced. Five things get tested, and a clip failing any of them has its views stripped before the number reaches a report.

• Watch history. A real account has consumed content before it posted any. An account created to post campaign clips has not.
• Posting mix. If everything on the account is campaign work, the audience is not an audience, it is a distribution list.
• Engagement shape. Real audiences produce a characteristic ratio between views, watch time, likes and comments. Purchased engagement does not, and it is obvious at scale.
• Velocity. Views arriving faster than a feed can physically deliver them did not come from a feed.
• Geography and language. A country record picking up its entire view count in a market where nobody speaks the language is not a discovery event.

Why a bot view is worse than no view

Bot activity is also a policy breach, not only a waste of budget. Spotify calls it artificial streaming and penalises it. The obvious cost is money. You paid for something that did not happen, which is annoying and finite.

The real cost is the signal. A manufactured view produces no completion, no save and no follow, so what the streaming platforms and the feed algorithms see is a large audience that encountered your record and rejected it. That is a worse position than never having run the campaign, and it is slow to recover from because recommendation systems weight recent behaviour heavily. A second exposure that follows a rejection signal performs worse than a first exposure would have.

There is a third cost that only shows up later. Sound pages built on bot activity are exactly what platform integrity teams look for, and a takedown on the sound page takes the legitimate creations down with it.

Master, sync and why clearance comes first

Verification is the last step of a campaign. Clearance is the first, and the two are connected: you cannot verify views on audio nobody had the right to use, because the clips will not still be up when the report runs.

Two separate rights are involved and campaigns get pulled because somebody cleared one and not the other.

On a live recording there is a third layer, because a performance creates a new master with its own owner even when the song is identical. On a music video there is a fourth, because the audiovisual work has a copyright of its own, usually sitting with the director or production company. Both cases are covered on rights-cleared clipping.

Clearance is set up once against a release or a catalogue, and every clip after that inherits it. That is why campaign number two launches in hours rather than weeks.

What ends up on a report

Four numbers, and none of them is a promise.

• Verified views, by clip and by creator, so you can see which angle worked rather than which total looked good.
• Sound creations, meaning how many separate videos used your official sound. This is the number that tells you whether the sound page is working as one destination.
• Save rate, because a save is a decision and a view is an accident of the scroll.
• Post links for every placement. Open them, read the comments, check it yourself. If an agency will not give you the links, ask why.

What is not on it: a stream count we caused, a chart position, or a projection. Streams and saves goes into where the causation between short-form and streaming genuinely breaks, and why we will not pretend otherwise.

Questions