YouTube said it has started to audit the views that videos receive on its site to cut down on fraudulent traffic. The move could be a boon to advertisers that seek greater accuracy and reliability in online ad metrics. "When some bad actors try to game the system by artificially inflating view counts, they're not just misleading fans about the popularity of a video, they're undermining one of YouTube's most important and unique qualities," Philipp Pfeiffenberger, a software engineer, wrote on Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) online security blog in the U.K. When audits reveal fraudulent views, YouTube will remove them from the video's view count, he wrote. "We don't expect this approach to affect more than a miniscule fraction of videos on YouTube," he said. Read more