Check your youtube viewing history!

[WonderCow]

I've been awol for a while because my tablet died and I couldn't remember my password. Lol.

Anyhow, my new tablet is super efficient and likes to send me notifications. I kept getting 'shared controls' notifications  from youtube,  Hmm, I thought, what's that all about?
A quick search on the interwebs led me to Reddit, where people were freaking out because there were random videos in their youtube history that they had never and would never watch, some in foreign languages, some had apparently been watched at times when they were asleep or at work,  


So I decided to check my youtube history. Sure enough, there's a  load of stuff I didn't watch, like Disney stuff and things a little kid would watch. 

I've cleared my history and paused it, and the notifications have stopped. I don't think it's a hack, I'm pretty  sure it's  the autoplay function generating ad income for youtube surreptitiously.

I can believe that! I never log-in to YouTube and now I'm wondering if it makes any difference!

We watch a lot of youtube on the telly, we never log in, but in the previously viewed section there is a lot of stuff that we haven't watched, but it seems to be there because we momentarily clicked those videos to get to the ones we wanted to watch.

About six months ago I read an article where youtube were congratulating themselves on an enormous increase in advertising revenue. This is how they did it.