NBC Sports has millions and millions of views on random podcasts, including one with 50M views and it’s not quite adding up.
YouTube has had a bot problem for years—more in their comment section than anywhere else but it’s apparent that there have been instances of view botting or subscriber botting. Usually it’s smaller YouTubers trying to gain a following or fading ones trying to remain relevant.
But this? This is an entirely different issue because NBC Sports is a relatively massive channel with a massive reach. It makes no sense for them to bot any views, especially for random podcasts. But that’s exactly what they’re doing.
NBC Sports Botting A Podcast?
I was watching some videos of the recent Olympics that were up on the channel, and I was trying to look for some of the more popular events and I clicked the NBC Sports YouTube channel, then I sorted by their most popular video.
It turns out it was a basketball podcast clip with 50 million views. I’m an avid NBA fan, so it confused me to see a video with that many views titled “Warriors ‘don’t stand a chance’ if Anthony Davis can remain elite”. Then I clicked it. It was from a podcast called Roundball Stew—one I’d never even heard of.
Sports podcasts are relatively big, but not close enough to reach 50M views on a single clip or episode—hell, barely any of the biggest podcasts, in general, could pull those numbers. So a random podcast on NBC Sports? The video had 38 comments and 96 likes.
And most of those 38 comments were about how it made no sense that the video had so many views. Keep in mind that regular 50M views at the very minimum would have hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands of comments.
The Tale of Two Botted Podcasts
Upon looking deeper, it seemed like this wasn’t the only botted video on the channel. This podcast, with barely any media attention, had nearly 100M views in totality. It turns out almost all of these views had to have been botted.
There are 75 videos from Roundball Stew on the NBC Sports YouTube channel and 38 of those have over 100K views. Of those, most, if not all, have less than 15 likes and 3 comments.
While surprising, it turns out this isn’t quite the only podcast that has been view botted, by the looks of it. This other podcast is also on NBC Sports: The 2 Robbies Podcast .
The 2 Robbies Podcast has an excessive amount of views compared to the engagement (likes, comments, etc.). A four-year-old video for an interview with NBA player Jimmy Butler has 7.3 million views but only 194 likes and 8 comments. The deeper you look, the less sense it actually makes.
Inexplicable Viewership
According to YouTube statistics tracker viewstats.com, the video had 115,636 views on October 21st, 2023 which was 1399 days after the video even released. From that point on the video gained 7.2M views consistently over a period of 7 months.
This includes a day where the video somehow got over 147,000 views in a single day which does not add up to the engagement. All eight comments are from 4 years ago so this video blowing up that late does not compute.
Then on June 1st, 2024, the video’s viewership fell down to earth relatively speaking. It was still getting a couple thousand views a day but not nearly as much as before.
A Random Video With 50M Views?
Going back to Roundball Stew’s video with 50M views—it tells us a similar story. The video started blowing up on October 16th, 2023. It had 3M views on October 15th which there isn’t a breakdown for. Every single day from this point on all the way until April 2nd, 2024 the video was gaining hundreds and thousands of views.
There were tons of days where it even got over 500K views a day, and it reached a peak of 967,000 views in a single day. All this for a video with seemingly no engagement.
Look at that fall-off. That is after April 2nd, and it shows something interesting. On April 3rd and 5th, the video seems to have lost views. A very small amount but I have combed through many videos with real views and I have never seen this so it doesn’t seem to be a viewstats error.
This seems to be YouTube potentially removing some viewership. While they didn’t remove much, it still seemed to have stopped more bot views from appearing afterwards.
I’ve combed through a lot of these videos from NBC Sports for both podcasts and by the looks of it, they’re all very similar. They all randomly blow up after a few weeks, months, and, in some cases years after they’ve been uploaded and consistently gain views for a period of a few months before they fall back down to earth.
Not NBC Sports’ First Bot Rodeo?
Look at the view chart. That is the total amount of lifetime views the channel has. So in a graph of all time views, it should always be linear since the total views can’t in theory go down. Yet, for NBC Sports there are two instances where their total view count all time went down.
This likely suggests that there was foul play involved that YouTube caught onto, both times in 2022 and removed hundreds of millions of views. In total for both times, around 460M views were removed.
For reference, here is a regular channel growth wise:
This is the biggest tech YouTuber on the platform, Marques Brownlee who has a similar view count to NBC Sports. The growth is linear. There’s never been any number of views removed, which likely means there wasn’t any foul play.
Most big YouTube channels are like this so to say that NBC Sports’ chart looks suspicious would be an understatement.
Total Bots Viewership For NBC SPorts
How many actual views did NBC Sports bot? While it’s hard to know, here’s an estimate just based on the two podcasts: Roundball Stew and The 2 Robbies Podcast. For Roundball Stew, based on viewership engagement, I counted every video with above 10K views as botted in some form.
While for 2 Robbies—they have more engagement. It’s hard to put a number since some of their 100K viewed videos have decent engagement while their 50K videos have very little in comparison so I will be very generous and only count anything above 200K here.
Roundball Stew: 99.7 million botted views on 53 videos
The 2 Robbies Podcast: 91.4 million botted views on 79 videos
Total: 191.1 million views
What’s The Motive?
Do keep in mind that this is a rough estimate and I’d wager there are even more botted views, especially for The 2 Robbies Podcast. There are some other videos on their channel that look suspicious, particularly podcasts but these two seem to be the only ones consistently getting botted to this degree.
That begs the question: why? While I can’t confirm who’s doing this—whether it’s the likely perpetrator, NBC Sports, or someone else doing it for them.
It’s hard to see how they’ve gotten away with this for so long. It’s a pattern used to gain hundreds of millions of views over a short period of time so I’m surprised to see YouTube hasn’t caught on.
It’s unclear whether it’s monetary or to make these podcasts look better, but it’s clear foul play for a channel with a history of botting.
That too, a channel owned by one of the biggest companies in the world that has no reason to do this. It’s hard to know who did it or why, but one thing is for sure: YouTube has to figure out its bot situation.
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