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
Before I started, I had something like 120 views. Average view time was 3-ish minutes, 14 likes if I remember well
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
As you can see in the 1st screen cap, they say 10,000 views can take 10-15 days. It took 2 DAYS
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:
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
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
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
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…
End result: 16 subscriptions (minus the ones I had before, more like 10), which represents a 0.001% return. Amazing! Or not.
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:
37 likes, 3 dislikes (I had 10-ish likes before that, no dislikes). That’s 0.003% out of 10k views
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
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.
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…
It took me 3 years to genuinely reach 1k views on one of my yt tutorials…out of those yt views about 15% is just me checking the vid to see how many views i have
Other tutorials i made are in the 50 to 350 range when it comes to views so…idk
Thanks @morphic for all the info! At least it seems to be real people with a few subs and likes and not only bots - looking at stuff like ChatGPT I’m sure bots can like tracks and write more or less convincing comments, but I would expect some other locations in that case.
Yeah, it’s hard to get views without leading people to your channel in some form when you don’t have thousands of subs. I had a few videos reaching 1000 or in one case even 2000 views in a relatively short time without many subs, but there was always some form of external linking involved (one time, some pros shared one of my links to a video on twitter, another time I posted a video on a discord for a contest or posted the link on many other sites and so on)…
Judging from the videos I get in my recommendations, most are from channels I already subscribed to OR stuff I’m not interested in at all with many many views…
Also fyi i have at least 70 something subscribers on yt…without marketing…and maybe 20 followers on bandcamp…
All without active marketing…
I figured ill let the quality of my music speak for itself.
I guess if anything make sure you get your chops in the music making department…and produce well mixed high quality music before marketing it.
In order to increase your chances of obtaining genuine fans…
Otherwise your listeners wont pay more than 5 seconds listening to your track if.
I know this because some of my bandcamp stats indicate a lot of listeners skipped over my music and payed no more than 5 to 30 seconds listening to it.
Yeah, in principle I agree but a few quick thoughts:
quality of work doesn’t matter if nobody hears it, without some form of promo you need a lot of luck for people to initially find you. I mean, some of my fav tracks in some genres have like 100 plays on Youtube… for instance the stuff by Agathacrusty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b6aB4tYR3Q this track has 110 plays, I think half of that are from me over the five years it is up lol…
every artist has to find the right audience. just uploading some tracks of a genre enjoyed by 1000 people on the planet is unlikely to get any likes since the chances are extremely low that these people will hear it. I would guess that the more mainstream the musical style is, the less external links or promo or whatever one needs to get some likes
catching the listener in the first few seconds with something interesting or, in many cases, something that clearly sounds like stuff they alread know with a little twist might be more important than overall quality
do you know if your subs are mostly from the music or from the tutorials? Just asking because I got 10x more subscribers from my tuts over the last year than from occasionally uploading tracks over a few years before I decided to do some tuts. I also noticed a few other channels that started out with music (sometimes not bad) with like 50 plays if you check the early videos but took off after they started posting completely different content… I think there is just too much music out there for people to check out stuff with just a few plays. For other forms of content, it is different, maybe partly because music is often deeply connected to lifestyle?
