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The world’s biggest online video site, YouTube, has pulled bililons of view counts from some of the music industry’s biggest artists due to what seems to be fabricated view counts.

Universal was the hardest hit of those pages. The label home of Rihanna, Kanye WestNicki Minaj and Justin Bieber, lost a total of one billion views in the video site’s biggest ever crackdown on artificially inflated figures. In total, Universal lost a grand total of 1,015,800,118 video views.

Sony BMG was the second hardest hit of the crackdown, losing 851,488,973 views and Britney Spears’ page, Britney TV lost 462,567,893 views. ‘This was not a bug or a security breach. This was an enforcement of our viewcount policy,’ YouTube said in a statement.

Chris Brown’s page, ChrisBrownTV, lost 187,412,448 views while Beyonce lost 151,445,205 views and TPainVideos lost 110,169,389. Google confirmed that the companies violated its terms of services, which prohibits users from artificially inflating video views. Google also notes that the view stripping was “an enforcement of [the company’s] viewcount policy”.

There are many sites on the internet such as YouLikeHits.com that can inflate your viral statistics like YouTube views, Facebook friends and Twitter followers for a fee. YouTube viewer figures are valuable to channel owners since it is the way the site works out how to share its advertising revenue with partners.

Also, it affects Billboard’s “Social 50” chart, which was only implemented in 2010 and is a ranking of the most active artists on the world’s leading social networking sites.

[Spotted at EOTM]

Photo: Kanye University