fraud in a Festool contest?

[Timtool]

There is a contest going on held by festool Belgium-luxemburg, you make a youtube video about something festool and the video with the most likes wins €1000 in tools.

I am taking part in it, so i monitor the votes from the other vids and i nearly choked yesterday when i saw one of the vids got thousands of views and hundreds of votes overnight, almost 9000 views and 300 likes only 9 days after it was posted.
that makes 1000 views a day, where the other contest vids range between 50 and 900 views total with around 30 likes average.
while now almost 12 hours after checking, the view or vote count hasn't moved at all, so where did these views and votes suddenly came from?
there is no link to the video anywhere on the internet, no forum no nothing. i posted links to mine on all the forums i am active on and got the second highest view count with 900 and 32 votes.
here is the link to the page with all the entries, i am talking about the second video from above, you judge if the video is worth those scores.

if you do an internet search, you will find that you can actually buy views and votes from certain companies who hack the system or on certain vote exchange forums. And according to the articles i read, the no1 give-away of fraud is a video with high views and votes but small amount of comments. Up to yesterday evening that video had a little under 9000 views and 300 votes and not a single comment...

there is an easy way to find the video on youtube, type in "festool" and sort the results out by "score", it's the video on top of the list, thats right it became no1 most liked "festool" tagged video ever in history, beating the woodwhisperer who needed 10 months to reach 105 likes...

another video i am suspicios about is actually the no3 most liked festool video in that list, almost 100 likes with only 200 views... making it the 3rd most popular festool video on youtube in 3 days with not a single comment. it's not as obvious as the first case, but still it raises questions. or am i paranoid?

 

[Alan m]

i dont know about no 3 but no1 sounds suspect . can you report it to the contest organisers

 

[Administrator_JSVN]

As mentioned, I would recommend that you contact Festool Belgium with your concerns. Moved to the Chat section of the forum since this really isn't about tools.

 

[Qwas]

I do agree that video is not worth 300+ likes.  [big grin] It is almost a comedy of errors.

I've been told before that you need to be careful watching the counts on YouTube. They do not automatically update each time a video is watch, especially in the first 24 hours. That might explain the numbers jumping overnight.

If the contest is about likes/dislikes votes then it makes sense that the other video in question has a large amount of votes compared to the view count. It tells me the owner did a good job getting the word out that you need to vote and not just view. I would suspect this guy has been busy campaigning his video. Of course, most of these voters would not leave a comment, perhaps most of them are not into woodworking. Nothing to be paranoid about there.

As Shane siad, I would bring your concerns up with Festool Belgium. If they are aware perhaps they can see something strange going on. [smile]

 

[greenMonster]

been happening since the internet was born

 

[nickao]

Festool Belgium made a huge mistake. Unless a company is certified, like Price Waterhouse, a contest should not be based on counts through a 3rd party web site. The votes should of had to be made on a Festool controlled site(like this forum for example) where they can monitor the voting. Most companies that have these contests actually hire out companies to track voting and I have never heard a big company like this use you tube and if they do the actual voting is on a separate link for the you tube video, not based on you tube stats. Look at my daughters high school contest. The contest is run by a company and the voting is controlled on their special web site. Using you tube is ridiculous. Even if everything was on the up and up it just leaves way to much potential for fraud and how could Festool Belgium actually follow up on complaints or prove the contest was not fixed. You tube does not have to give them IP addresses or anything and Festool Belgium has no way to verify the results.

I must say, though I have never participated, I never felt any contest here on the FOG was anything but honest and fair.

 

[AlexThePalex]

I think the whole contest was specifically meant to get more video's about Festool on YouTube. As a promotion. Any marketing department should understand the value of such websites or they wouldn't be doing their jobs properly. But I agree it is difficult to control and make sure everything goes fair.

But I also wouldn't cry "fraude" too quickly. Timtool asked people here to vote for him, what if the other guy also did this but on a more populated website? I frequent a couple of websites with user generated content that get 100.000 visitors per day or more. Post a video there and even people who are not the least bit interested in tools would click the link just because they've got nothing better to do that moment. Some videos get thousands of views in a matter of hours if not minutes. And what if he'd put it on Twitter or Facebook? We know the potential of those sites. Fraude, viral, anything is possible on the net.

 

[Timtool]

I did send a mail to the media department of festool.be, but i don't expect a quick response if any. I will keep you updated on that.

It's always possible that the poster is a popular member of some forum, but there are no statistics available for his video.
So either youtube made an error somehow, or either there are no links to his video anywhere which isn't possible as there is at least one link on the festool site. Youtube does have a freeze mechanism that blocks the stats for videos they suspect of stat fraud. I don't know if it's the case here.
On top of that the most watched of his 6 other videos got less than 400 views in 2 years.
Now if only the video was actually great i would understand, but it's 9 minutes of someone cutting with a TS using no hearing protection, no safety glasses, no text, no explanation of what he is doing/making.

I think the idea of Festool was indeed to get more Belgian videos online, but attaching an important prize to it based on votes was naive. The contest rules mention no technical details like not being allowed to use vote exchange, or artificial vote increase software. These kind of contests apparently systematically lead to fraud, and there is no way to prove it. Especially when there are no statistics available where you can see the links to the video.
I now simply hope the contest is called off, or that some kind of jury designates the winner. otherwise it's already obvious that winning will not depend on quality, but rather on finding the best work-arounds to get votes.

 

[Pieter Troch]

Tim,

aldough I have been on forums the last weeks for hours a day I took me more than a month to find this post  [big grin]

for other readers: I also enterd the contest and have been following all video's very very closely.

more than a month after this post there is not a big change in the strange results of the two other video's.
The first one has 9000+ views and 570 likes, the second one 1200 views and 585 likes.

I also reported the video's and been googling around on the internet. You just don't find any site where there video is on (other than the one's auto linked to youtube)

I'm currently at place one with 5500 views and 641 likes.  To achieve this I made a movie that is original and shows what Festool is all about.  on top of the movie I've been posting and talking on forums (26 already), getting the word out on FB and twitter, going to shop in shops to show my model and promote to get likes, ....
At an average I've been behind my computer 3 hours a day, just promoting my video.
My stats are public and I get likes with an average of 30 a day.

surfing the internet I came accross all kind of deals you can make to get votes, even buying likes....500 likes for 50$.....sounds familiar?  Both the other contestants got 500 likes very fast (in a mather of days) and once they reached above 500 it stopped completley....suspicous?

Festool can ask the winner to give his stats.  On youtube you can download your statistics from day one and see every viewer and person who liked and where from.  (no IP adresses)
if you see on that stats that 500 people voted from 1 country and all using the same link to get there than it's pretty obvious.

I choose to make my stats public as I don't have to hide anything, okay you can see part of my campagne and on what forums I posted but I hope that the one contestant with his 9 minutes of embarrasing Festool posts on this forum....maybe his dislikes will only get better than  [big grin]

one week more to go and I really hope they don't have another package of likes up their sleeve for the last days...

we keep you all informed!