---
title: "How to Get 44 Million Views Without Bothering the Viewers"
description: "An Al Jazeera data probe dismantles the viewing figures behind the official rejoinder to the Israeli documentary NAZA"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-15T13:35:46Z
modified: 2026-10-15T15:23:53Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/how-to-get-44-million-views-without-bothering-the-viewers-7ea705
language: en
tags: ["media", "israel", "gaza", "ai", "propaganda", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# How to Get 44 Million Views Without Bothering the Viewers

*An Al Jazeera data probe dismantles the viewing figures behind the official rejoinder to the Israeli documentary NAZA*

By Nate Ledger · October 15, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/how-to-get-44-million-views-without-bothering-the-viewers-7ea705

## In brief

- Al Jazeera traced the counter-film’s site to an anonymous Sept 16 registration that initially posed as the official NAZA page
- The site displayed 43,758,421 ‘views’ by Oct 14; the film’s YouTube had under 130,000, a roughly 336-fold gap
- Source code labelled the figure ‘visitors’ internally; the counter loads at 97% then ticks up for three seconds
- Semrush put visits near 500,000; Similarweb counted 326 for September; the site missed the Tranco top-million list
- Israel’s Washington embassy promoted the film and Tzipi Hotovely cited tens of millions of views while honouring its makers

Imagine you run a national public diplomacy effort, and a documentary comes out that makes your country look terrible. Not opinion-piece terrible, but prize-at-Venice terrible: a film that assembles testimony from Israeli military whistleblowers and names the army’s own word for the civilian deaths it plans for in its air strikes. The film gets a 25-minute standing ovation and distribution in 56 countries. There are a few things you could do. You could commission an inquiry. You could simply not watch it. Or you could make your own 49-minute film, put it on the internet, and then — and this is the creative part — put a little number on the webpage that says how many people watched your film, and make that number whatever you feel like.

The third option, [according to an Al Jazeera data investigation](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/15/al-jazeera-probe-exposes-fake-viewing-numbers-for-israeli-counter-film), is roughly what happened after the release of *NAZA*, the documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor built on interviews with 24 unnamed Israeli servicemen who accuse the army of using AI-assisted targeting systems that killed large numbers of civilians in Gaza. The film takes its title from the Israeli military term for the civilian casualties expected in a given strike. It won the special jury prize at Venice. In Israel, it triggered something closer to an alarm bell: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded the chief of general staff, the Shin Bet chief and the attorney general open a comprehensive investigation into the film’s participants with an eye to prosecuting them for information-security offences, while Netanyahu and Culture Minister Miki Zohar mused publicly about revoking the directors’ citizenship. The directors were accused of treason. Strong reviews, of a kind.

![A hand holds red scissors cutting a filmstrip unspooling from a vintage movie projector, which casts a cream beam across a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/1e2f76c5b9d45bd405fa9b0367a4ad2747944485.webp)

On September 16, days after *NAZA* premiered, someone registered nazadocumentary.com through Cloudflare with the owner’s details hidden. Al Jazeera’s investigators found, via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, that the site initially presented itself as the official *NAZA* website, complete with the directors’ names and screening and press information — only describing the film as an exposé of the systems behind the calculated mass killing of terrorists in Gaza, which is one way to phrase the film’s thesis if you are very committed to having this argument. By September 30 the impostor page had been swapped out for a new one titled *NAZA: The Real Story*. Two more domains, whatisnaza.com and watchnaza.com, were later registered to funnel traffic to it. The men behind the counter-film — Ariel Averbuch, Roy Danino and Hagai Gutman — said they funded it themselves.

## A counter with no viewers behind it

Here is where the arithmetic gets fun. By the morning of October 14, the counter on the site displayed 43,758,421 views. It did not say where that number came from or how it was computed. Meanwhile, the film’s actual distribution chain told a quieter story. The full 49-minute cut on its official YouTube channel had not passed 130,000 views by the same date. Do the division and the website’s figure is around 336 times the measurable audience. The YouTube channel had fewer than 2,000 subscribers, and the film’s account on X had 170 followers, which is not 44 million any way you round it.

![A person in a red chair faces a large crowd of dark silhouettes arranged within a widening triangular shadow against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/dd44e8c6cdf902e9d4607072d719bcc80de7106c.webp)

Outside traffic monitors agreed the room was emptier than advertised. Semrush, the US-based analytics platform, put the site’s total visits through October 8 at roughly half a million. Similarweb, founded in Israel, estimated 326 visits for September — not 326 thousand, 326 — and none of the film’s domains appeared on the Tranco list of the internet’s one million most-visited sites. Half a million, 326 and 130,000 are three different numbers, but the order of magnitude is consistent: the traffic is a rounding error on the claim.

The page’s own guts were the most candid part of the operation. In the source code, the element that shows the big figure is labelled “visitors” internally while being pitched to the reader as “views” — already a friendly conflation, since a million people glancing at a page for two seconds is not a million people watching a film. The figure arrives straight from the site’s server, so nobody outside can see how it is derived. And when you open the page, the counter loads at 97 percent of its value and then ticks upward for three seconds, which produces the visual effect of a live count without the inconvenience of a live count. Separately, Al Jazeera found, the site does quietly collect real viewing data — a “watch-tracker” that phones home after about 25 seconds of playback, logging the session and what was watched — it just doesn’t publish any of it. Whether the big number has any relation to that hidden data is, by design, unknowable.

![A stylized cream and navy clock with a red hand and wind-up key sits on a teal background, with a cord ending in an electrical plug.](https://rews.cc/img/10a74bf406746fd0f12bade5478d9f3c122f0445.webp)

## From web widget to official talking point

The point of a number like that isn’t really to convince web-traffic analysts; it’s to be quoted. And it was. The Israeli Embassy in Washington promoted the counter-film on social media on October 3. Tzipi Hotovely, head of Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate, handed the three creators certificates of recognition for countering the original documentary and said their film had drawn tens of millions of views. At which point an unverifiable integer served off a Cloudflare-registered, anonymously owned domain had completed its journey into an official statement of the Israeli government.

I think the interesting thing here is not that a propaganda outfit inflated its numbers — that is among the oldest and least surprising practices available — but how thin the material needs to be once you control the label. You don’t need viewers. You need one HTML element, a counter animation and an official willing to read the output aloud. The film this was all meant to blunt made its case from 24 soldiers testifying on the record’s edge; the rebuttal made its case from a *span tag*.

All of it is unfolding in the shadow of Israel’s war in Gaza, which began in October 2023 and in which, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least 74,000 Palestinians have been killed, including at least 21,000 children. Whatever the true audience of *NAZA: The Real Story* was, it wasn’t who that war happened to.