By Jackson West, 1:00 PM on Tue Sep 30 2008, 428 views (Edit, to draft, Top, Slurp)

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Site YouTube Reviewed began banging the drum early and loudly that the original content project for YouTube from HBO Labs, Hooking Up, is terrible. They've since chronicled everyone from YouTube's content partnership wrangler George Stromoplous to one of the YouTube fameballs who appears in the show, Cory "Mr. Safety" Williams, distancing themselves from endorsing the show. And now it seems that someone at HBO is trying to juice the subscriber stats to make the show look more popular than it is.

Which, granted, has a long tradition on YouTube (even Williams has admitted to gaming his view counts in his early days on the site). How might it hurt the popular video distribution platform? But once again, it's not the kind of thing advertisers like to hear — especially while YouTube's parent company, Google, has CEO Eric Schmidt telling anyone who will listen how awesomely transparent online advertising is.

If YouTube doesn't act to stop a content partner from gaming the viewership numbers, it will have a hard time convincing advertisers to buy inventory when those advertisers feel some of that inventory is fraudulent. Especially when those advertisers can create distribute their own ads using YouTube for free and get reliable data for themselves by simply not manipulating audience metrics.