Of course this means that up until now paid-for plays were included in YouTube’s Charts but hey, better late than never right?

YouTube have just announced that they have changed the methodology of their charts and 24-hour records. This means that views on videos/music gained by paid advertising and promotions will no longer count into the ranking.

YouTube say that they want to maintain “credibility” in their charts so they are moving to only include organic plays for fairness. A bunch of artists have touted their views in the first 24-hours as signs of their achievements but the way that these views were counted could easily be heavily influenced by paid promotions.

This summer a high profile case saw Indian Sony Music artist Badshah claiming he had broken the record for the most views in 24-hours. However many of his views were found to have come from adverts that had been purchased and embedded in Google and YouTube.

YouTube said in a blog post: “YouTube Music Charts have become an indispensable source for the industry and the most accurate place for measuring the popularity of music listening behaviour happening on the world’s largest music platform. Over the last few years, fans, artists, and their teams have touted the number of views a video receives on YouTube within the first 24 hours as the definitive representation of its instant cultural impact.

“It’s a great honour and one we take very seriously. As we look to maintain consistency and credibility across our platform, we’ve made some necessary revisions to our methodology for reporting 24-hour debut records.”

Organic video views which YouTube will count into it’s Charts and 24-hour record debuts include: direct links to the video, search results, external sites that embed the video and YouTube sections like the homepage, Trending, and ‘watch next’.

YouTube adds: “Our goal is to ensure YouTube remains a place where all artists are accurately recognised and celebrated for achieving success and milestones… It’s the artists and fans that have made YouTube the best and most accurate measure of the world’s listening tastes, and we intend on keeping it that way.”

Additional information on how YouTube Music Charts are calculated can be found here and additional details about YouTube Views and ads can be found here.