How easy is it to buy YouTube views? $46 for 20,000 easy.
latimes.com
latimes.com
Today there's a huge number of social media companies, some founded by ex-ad industry guys and others by wantrepreneurs, and they make a lot of money "creating" viral videos for their customers. This is very similar to the dotcom scenario: company A pays social media startup B to make a series of viral videos. Because the results of this campaign are measured mostly in terms of views B uses part of the money to inflate the number of views.
The problem as I been saying some colleagues at marketing for years, is that corporate clients are realizing this for the simple fact that viral numbers don't translate in sales or user engagement/loyalty, case in point only 1% of FB users who "Like" a company's page return at some point in the future.
Now that this little fact has made its way to the mainstream media it's only a matter of time until the idea that viral marketing its completely useless becomes ingrained in the public's mind.
Once that happens there's no way back.
It doesn't matter that the views are worthless. Even if they know you 'did something' to make that happen, they'd be happy because other people looking at it would think they are more legitimate for it. Its all about perception. I remember people running various bots and scripts to blow up their MySpace music play counts. "Wow this band has 300k plays? They must be good!". Same could be said for Twitter follower count, etc...
It can all be gamed. The question is how many people realize its been gamed?
Overall there's a trend toward the value (ROI) of advertising almost always dropping as better data on the ROI becomes widely available. Advertisers try their hardest to show the ad buyers that the ads are being massively effective, and try to hide any statistics that speak to the contrary.
Most advertising isn't effective. Period. Of course, it isn't just the form that's bad, but the message as well so it can't all be blamed on the medium.
New forms of advertising like to pretend that new money is actually being spent by consumers. Surely, there is shift in consumer spending, but it rarely coincides with the growth of a new broadcast media. Just because there's Youtube|Twitter|MySpace doesn't mean more people are buying cars|music|clothing. Yet, brands want to throw money there in hopes that there will be.
Slowly there is a realization that those $10CPM ads were only returning $3CPM of investment. When enough people realize this (it takes a while) the value drops for everyone.
Details on http://en.blog.guylhem.net/post/18384978350/mechanical-turk-...
I wonder how frequent it is.
Web-based advertising can, potentially, allow for a much more sophisticated and surgical approach. But advertisers aren't used to thinking surgically. They still want their shotgun. (They call the shotgun "reach," or use terms like "GRPs" to attempt to quantify reach). That's why broad, sloppy metrics like total video views, or total pageviews, or total clicks, still appeal to advertisers. They're still working from the mental model that you need to fire a big spray of shot, and that you apply some sort of fractional discount to the total number of people you fired at, and that fraction is who you managed to get. It's a dumb, top-down, unsophisticated approach to advertising -- but it persists, and so long as it does, there will remain a healthy market for "viral" services.
http://jobreapr.com/jobs/similar/get-you-5000-youtube-views-...
If these services actually relied on ads and real people, then they are doing some amazing work. Getting 20K people to click on a video for $46 is amazing given current CPC rates.
Getting 20K first world people interested enough to click might be amazing but watching a few thousand of these a day at those rates might make minimum wage in say Ulan Bator.
Mongolian minimum wage ~ $4 a day
1/20,000 of $46 is .23 cents
That's ~1,600 vids a day but a worker would prolly see less then a third of the total so let's say 5k videos a day. Prolly counts as a view as soon as you watch a second or two though -- you'd need 10 vids a minute to maintain 5k a day.
Meh, a "Mongolian Turk" horde seems possible but bots seem far more likely and attractive as you say.
Maybe you even share the profits with the computer owner.
It is more like (ok, not exactly) getting your startup promoted on Techcrunch. If your startup has some material, then this exposure can get you go places. But if your startup is crappy, it will not matter whether you get on their front page or not, your startup will fail.
The inflated video views gives an initial kick start for your video becoming viral. If you have a reasonably good video that could grab some attention, this will give it a fast push to being viral.
There are sites out there that picks the popular videos. Even you tube will get you on the trending video. Once the avalanche starts, it will just get going.
But if the video is crappy, the initial views will be all that you can get for your video.
The view companies are just faking the refferer. This is a common technique in internet marketinn. I used to sell clients views services like that, and I've helped videos go viral by ordering from multiple sources and getting over 100,000 views in less than 72 hours, propelling the videos to the front page. This results in the videos actually getting real organic views way beyond what was "fake."
Youtube promotes trending videos, so if you get a lot of views very quickly, particularly among a common demographic, then the video will be more heavily promoted, and is more likely to go viral.
Similarly, videos with lots of view tend to appear higher in search results.
I imagine that people at youtube are very aware of this, and put an effort into distinguishing ``real'' view (consistent demographic/trusted referer) and ``fake'' (spammy/ black hat SEO) views.
"Somebody that I used to know" likely hasn't been seen by 100M people, but the people who have seen it keep watching it. Over, and over...
I used a "traffic generation" service once (note once) and it seemed to operate through pop-unders/iframes on various third-rate sites with high traffic volume (MP3 download sites, celebrity news, etc).
Bounce rate was close to 100% and conversion was 0, but it made the hit count shoot off the chart. Interestingly, a lot of the hits never registered on Google Analytics but showed up on the web server logs. They appeared to be legitimate traffic (different IPs, user agents, etc).
My guess is that instead it was a rented botnet.
Essentially you payed to DDOS yourself.
I think I generally am quick enough to close a pop-up before the page has loaded, which sometimes/often would mean the Google Analytics script hasn't loaded (depending on how Analytics was setup - the new async loaded at the top of the page would probably have caught me, the older syncronous one at the end of the page would probably have missed me).