aka: I tried this offer so you don’t have to.
Background:
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I decided to give this a shot, see what happens. Ultimately, I figured that getting those views might make the video appear in YT and Google searches, so it couldn’t hurt
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Before I started, I had something like 120 views. Average view time was 3-ish minutes, 14 likes if I remember well
What ArtistPR says:
Pricing: I got a 50% off offer, thought it was just fake promo BS but apparently, it is listed as $350 for 10,000 YT views on their website
They have other packages that guarantee stupid numbers (over 100,000 views) if you spend a lot of money
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As you can see in the 1st screen cap, they say 10,000 views can take 10-15 days. It took 2 DAYS
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They mention this is legal/in accordance to YT standards, so that would mean no bots. That, or they found a way to game the system. I’m guessing it’s just a case of your video is going to auto-play after something the viewer is watching, until the viewer kills it off.
Viewing duration: unsurprisingly, the average view time went down the shitter:
- My average view time before the experiment was 3-ish minutes. People actually watched it…
Geography: I am a star in 3rd world countries!
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Nothing against (most of) those countries but you know that the viewership coming from there will not yield any commercial results/nobody’s going to pay for your stuff
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ArtistPR of course failed to mention that the markets they would target do not include EVEN ONE industrialized/1st world country. My guess is that it’s insanely cheap to get YT ads in these countries
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The only reason why you can see France at the bottom of the list is because I have friends there; those happened before the experiment
Viewership Age:
Nothing out of the ordinary there, looks quite spread out
Gender:
Almost 75% Male then. Frankly, based on the countries that were targeted, I’m surprised it’s not 95% Male, considering how Females are treated and have limited rights in many of those places…
Subscription:
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End result: 16 subscriptions (minus the ones I had before, more like 10), which represents a 0.001% return. Amazing! Or not.
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To be able to subscribe (or like), you need to have a YT account. How many people from those 10k have that in these countries? We’ll never know. Somehow I can’t help thinking results would have been much different if the target countries were EU5, Americas, Australia, etc.
Likes:
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37 likes, 3 dislikes (I had 10-ish likes before that, no dislikes). That’s 0.003% out of 10k views
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Unsurprisingly, hard to like something if you watch 29 seconds of it, most probably by accident. And as mentioned above, how many of those folks have a YT account…?
Verdict
PROS
- You get 10,000 views
CONS
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What ArtistPR don’t tell you is that, wherever they put the ads on, they remove them as soon as you got the 10,000 views. Why? Because they want you to pay for more views. Total dick move, the ads were only on for 2 days then the whole thing died off.
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Based on the markets reached, you know that nothing is going to come out of it, commercially-speaking. Despite having links to my Spotify, Bandcamp, etc., the ensuing activity on those sites was virtually non-existent
TL;DR - Is it worth it?
Yes & no. I did this to boost numbers, hoping it may make the video visible in YT/Google searches. Also, people are more inclined to click on a video with 10k views than 100-ish. If you expect any commercial/$$ returns, forget about it.
There you are! Now you know. I hope this was informative, especially since I wrote the whole thing and then mistakenly erased half of it, which was a major pain in the ass…
Any questions, do ask below!