Growth is incredibly difficult for anyone starting out on YouTube – especially with how saturated the market is at this point – yet what if there was a method you could use to skip the hard part?
It's certainly an attractive prospect, and something many people have considered over the years, albeit at a financial cost.
However, one creator has revealed why it might not be the best idea, with a number of unexpected results during the experimentation process.
If you've been on YouTube for any length of time you've likely encountered at least one video with obviously botted views, as these are typically indicated by low comment or like counts, alongside a channel with minimal engagement overall.
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This typically comes from services that allow people to buy views or subscribers, ultilizing scripts and bots to manufacture numbers on certain videos, but this has become more difficult to achieve over the years due to crackdowns from YouTube itself.
VEED CREATORS – a channel providing advice and guides for creators looking to grow their own outreach – decided to put these dodgy services to the test with a completely fresh channel, and it provided an important lesson by the end.
Firstly, they decided to create a new channel both to avoid any bans from breaching YouTube's terms of service and to see how it would work for someone starting out fresh.
The service they decided to go for cost $32.99 for 1,000 subscribers, promising a 'natural increase' with 'real subscribers', alongside a process that began within just 48 hours.
In reality it was far less impressive though, as after two weeks the new channel had gained just 94 subscribers and the two videos they'd uploaded had just a single view between them with a pathetic 46 seconds of watch time — and it wasn't even from one of the bought subscribers.
One alarming detail is that while most days saw small subscriber gains, one day in particular had a decrease of 13, indicating that a group of the bot-driven accounts had already been banned by YouTube within such a short period of time.
While the overall lesson is partly that these services simply don't work, it likely still wouldn't be entirely worthwhile if they did.
"The fact of the matter is that growing on YouTube is very difficult, but it's not an impossible task and you're going to get much more satisfaction from the whole process by growing an audience that's actually engaged in your content, not by focusing on these hollow, fake robots," the creator explains.
While bots might give you a headstart, you'll never actually get anywhere or have any kind of meaningful relationship with your own content until you find your audience of real people, and that unfortunately takes time and effort but is more than worth it in the end.