
How easy is it to buy YouTube views? $46 for 20,000 easy. - dazbradbury
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-trutanich-video-20120304,0,4196656.story
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JVIDEL
This situation is nothing new, its very similar to what happened during the
dotcom bubble in the late '90s: back then small startups used a sizable chunk
of their funding to run banner ads on popular portals like Yahoo. Some times
they received that funding after gaining some notoriety after running some
small ads, which prompted them to run even more ads. Because the business
plans of most of these startups was a joke there were no revenues and soon
they ran out of money. As it turns out it was all a closed-loop, the major
dotcom companies like Yahoo received far more money from these startups' ads
than from other companies/products, so as soon as the startups died the
revenue of major portals took a nosedive and the markets went crazy.

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.

~~~
tibbon
This is incredibly true. If I was some type of marketing consultant or
whatever, and lets say I was trying to market a band that was paying me (as if
bands have money these days), if I could get them 60,000 views in a few days
this would seem absolutely huge to the average smaller band. Their assumptions
would be that they are getting huge in comparison to their local competition.

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?

~~~
JVIDEL
Right now it seems that number it's on the rise, so I guess is a matter of how
long this line of business will last considering cash-strapped businesses wont
spend a dime on something that's widely considered to be useless/ineffective.

~~~
tibbon
You'd think that it would stop working right? Yet, it doesn't seem to. It just
moves.

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.

~~~
matznerd
Sometimes it's hard to value the investment for ROI, especially in terms of
perception as you mentioned above. The fact is though, social proof is an
element of popularity and so people will continue to game social elements like
that.

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callmeed
You can get between 1k-8k views for $5 on Fiverr:
<http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=YouTube+Views>

~~~
matznerd
You have to watch out, a lot of websites out there that sell views are really
just resellers. You have to find the site that is provided to all of
them...From what I hear, youtube has been cracking down on their methods
pretty well, but the black hatters always evolve and prevail, at least in the
short term.

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Steko
Interesting. I figured these services ran on bots but they are just applying
their knowledge of how to promote videos through cheaper ad networks.

~~~
tibbon
While the viewing stats would be really interesting to see, it would seem to
indicate that you could potentially just use Facebook's ads yourself to do
this cheaper. However, I've had little success myself getting 5 cent clicks on
Facebook.

~~~
guylhem
You mean getting a click for 5 cents? I got a 100% success on 10 cents during
a test. Apparently, from the results most of the clickers came from India.

~~~
tibbon
Ah, I should have clarified. When I fixed the ads to my demographics (people
who like competing brands/products, US (because that is where our product is
available)) then mine went up to .60 sometimes.

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matznerd
If you want a free resource for views that are semi-real, just use vagex.com
it is basically a traffic exchange. You download a viewer and run it and
generate credits which you can then use to purchase views for your video.

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nextparadigms
I think I heard you can get 10,000 Facebook followers for about $100 just a
few days ago. These sort of tactics are nothing new. But they are usually
pretty worthless. You need to have some kind of relationship with your
followers - not to be a spammer to a large list of them.

~~~
arkitaip
View inflation can create the illusion of popularity which can be incredibly
vital for lots of purposes, e.g. convincing investors, building hype, etc.

~~~
ig1
If you're knowingly using inflated figure for raising investment you need to
be very careful you're not committing fraud.

~~~
rhizome
Ehh, people would just call it load testing or something.

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nmridul
I am not sure why HN fails understand the value of youtube video views.

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.

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matznerd
There is no way those views are coming from Facebook, the traffic is too
expensive based on the rates they are charging.

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."

~~~
robryan
Maybe they are embedding them in apps/ business pages.

~~~
matznerd
That's possible as well, but they still would have had to drive traffic to
those pages, and again, ads would be too expensive. I had a client who
requested that the people be real, and so instead of bot views that normal
providers used, I found another guy. Apparently the people were tricked into
watching the video with a clickjack from a pr0n website.

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anodari
It's an excelent gift idea!

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sheraz
Funny and cool use of price arbitrage -- assuming the LA times article is
correct in its assumptions.

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pak
Is this to juke the stats to make a video seem more popular than it is? If you
divide that out it's about $0.05 per 20 views. I think you could ask somebody
on Mechanical Turk to open 20 browser tabs and let them sit for 2 minutes with
bids of about a nickel.

~~~
corin_
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe YouTube counts unique views, so 20 tabs
would still be one view.

~~~
redthrowaway
Youtube counts unique views for, I believe, the first 308 views. After that it
counts people who watch it till some point that I forget.

"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...

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snorkel
Couldn't anyone do the same or better using Amazon mech Turk?

~~~
garethsprice
Even at $0.01 a HIT, that's $200 for 20,000 views.

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).

~~~
Danieru
Supposing they were real users they would have had to disable javascript to
not show up in google analytics.

My guess is that instead it was a rented botnet.

Essentially you payed to DDOS yourself.

~~~
nl
It's possible lots of people are quick at closing pop-up/under windows.

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).

~~~
instakill
My cmd-w fingers are quick off the mark when they need to be.

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GigabyteCoin
I can have actual humans crack 1,000 captchas for $1USD and have been able to
do so for years now - what's new?

