[Smithy]

Major recording companies have lost more than two billion video views on YouTube after the video sharing website cracked down on alleged fake views.

The biggest hit was taken by Universal, home of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber, which lost more than one billion views from its total of seven billion.

Sony was second hardest hit, with the label behind such stars as Alicia Keys, Rita Ora and Labrinth losing more than 850million views in a single day.

The dramatic falls, highlighted by figures compiled by YouTube statistics analysts at SocialBlade, came after YouTube conducted an audit of its viewing figures aimed at combating black hat view count-building techniques. This is when hackers artificially build up the numbers of views or likes on a YouTube video - enabling them to make clips appear far more popular than they really are and increase their exposure on the site. The viewcount culls will be damaging to the labels affected since YouTube is now web's premier outlet for music videos. Over four billion hours of video are watched by over 800million unique visitors to the site each month.

The Daily Dot reported how many of the channels affected - which also include ones belonging to Michael Jackson, Chris Brown and Beyonce, among others - had also had many videos deleted.

sad that it's come to this