It's a race to the top for YouTube creators as they vie for the attention of the masses, but one creator has wondered whether there's a shortcut that you can use for a helping hand, albeit through rather unethical means.
While most of the biggest channels earn most of their money outside of YouTube directly these days due to the reduction of adsense revenue, it's still a significant stream of funds for many and it can continue to open up doors to further opportunities.
Countless creators work for years to build up their following, often uploading daily to capture people's interest and provide a consistent flow of content, yet that doesn't always pay off when it comes to views.
There is one method that you can use to guarantee eyes on your videos though, and this became a point of intrigue for one creator as they decided to see if it would lead to success for their channel.
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As shared by Supercar Blondie, Marcus Jones decided to test out with the various different ways to 'purchase' views on YouTube, purely as a means to see if they could actually provide a boost to his channel.
The first and most obvious place to start was with botted views, which use automated scrips to provide an almost immediate bump in viewership for specific videos. This looks good on paper from an outsider at first glance and can give legitimacy to a certain video – or your entire channel as a result – but it's effectively useless for any long-term progress.
Costing just $26 for 10,000 views, Jones quickly realized that while the viewcount increased as expected, his watch time, subscriber growth, and click-through rate remained static — and they're all of the most important metrics for climbing the YouTube ladder.
He then tried buying 'real' views, which is largely the same as the bot-based alternative but utilizing actual humans this time, albeit leading to the same result. As these people weren't actually 'real' viewers interested in his channel, they left no impact once again.
The two methods that allowed him to actually see improvement, however, came from within YouTube's own systems — as he took advantage of YouTube Studio's Promotions feature and Google Ads with varying degrees of success.
Promotions allowed him to send his videos to real YouTube users as an ad, which did actually result in both views and subscribers, although the watch time was still comparatively weak.
The real winner was Google Ads though, as this promoted his video as both skippable and in-feed ads, earning him nearly 5 million views in the process — yet he still wasn't able to achieve the same algorithmic success that 'organic' views could create.