Check your YouTube history. Videos that you did not watch or click, are likely being added to your history. They are showing a red bar indicating they’ve been viewed.
This is showing investors and advertisers more clicks and views than are actually happening. This is fraud.
Turn the history off. Simple.
If you don't watch a video to the very end the creator doesn't get credit. There are many creators that have audiences that put their videos on, and walk away for topics they don't like just so the creator can get paid.
This actually happen to you? They can easily fake the numbers with bots without having to include a potentially negative variable (you). Click farms have been around for ages so I don't see the point of them using real user accounts to get the same result. Especially when that's typically done by 3rd party folks as their employees have complete access to the back end and can rig shit without even needing the bot net. The feed is so sensitive just clicking a link from a friend can totally fuck your feed up so I have a hard time believing they could put stuff in your history without ppl noticing since it would alter your feed every time they did it. As a power user my issue is that stuff won't come up in history searches, but I assume it's just due to consuming too much not malice.