They recognize that you have been caught for the issue once, and will be on the lookout for it happening again. If you’ve had a video removed for “viewcount gaming” as it’s called, you can use this appeal form to get the video restored and whatever flag was placed on your account lifted.ĭid I mention they flag your account? It’s not a visible flag like a copyright strike, though, it’s more of an internal flag. If you’ve been caught buying excessive views, or doing so repeatedly for the same video, it’s likely that YouTube is going to remove the video rather than deal with trying to reprimand you in a way that won’t simply result in finding ways to hide your habits. YouTube understands this and won’t punish you unless there’s clear signs that the views have been purchased. Fake views happen all the time, and you don’t have to buy them for that to be the case. Now, it’s entirely possible that nothing else happens. This is why videos with a lot of fake views could hit 300, freeze, then drop back down when the bad views were removed from the count. Once you hit 300 views, they would start to care, and would audit the count. They decided to set a threshold, below which they simply didn’t care. There are tons of videos on YouTube, and the site only has so much processing power available. It was, in fact, YouTube flagging the video for view auditing. In fact, if you remember the old 301+ view count bug, that wasn’t actually a bug. The first consequence is relatively minor. The views will not be counted or will disappear.Here are the consequences in order of severity. The price you pay for a view on AdWords might get you 500 views from a different seller.īuying views that come from redirects, from pop-unders, from deceptive layouts that hide the video and autoplay it, or buying them purely from a site like Fiverr that provides bot/clickfarm views at a rate of thousands per dollar, those are all bad methods of buying views. This is valid and viable, of course, but since it’s expensive it’s not the ideal for many people considering buying views. You figure out your demographics, you make ads, you get people onto your page and you get them watching your video. However, what they mean by “buying views” in this case is using AdWords to dig into PPC marketing. So, the consequences of buying views depend on the quality and source of those views.īuying legitimate views is perfectly fine, even expected as far as YouTube is concerned. You can buy legitimate views, but you cannot buy bad views without risking sanction. The Consequences of Buying Viewsīuying views is not banned by YouTube entirely. Still, they’re views.Īt the top end you have all the great, engaged viewers within your demographics and target areas. Some of them have adblockers enabled so you don’t even get ad revenue from them. They put videos on in the background, but they don’t click links or read descriptions. In the middle, you have a lot of casual viewers who view random content on YouTube, but aren’t really that interested in what they’re doing. They might be infected with a virus that loads videos in browser tabs positioned way off the side of the screen, so there’s no indication besides bandwidth drain that they’re being watched. They might be people stumbling upon embedded videos with autoplay enabled, possibly even hidden behind other elements of a site. They might be clickfarm users being paid to watch videos. At the bottom end you have legitimate people who are “watching” a video without actually watching it. They’re cheap and plentiful, but they’re also easy to detect and filter.
On the other end, bad bots come in massive numbers, because they’re spoofed data and IPs all using the same behaviors. However, they’re also a lot of work to set up and keep running, so they’re only available in low volumes.
Good bots are excellent at imitating real behavior, have valid referral information, and often slip past YouTube’s filters. On the bot scale, you have good bots and bad bots. There’s a scale to both categories, though. Bots are bots, and often try to imitate real people, but are also often caught. Real views are real people, and act like it. Views come in two major categories: real and bot. Views from different countries, views from different demographics, and so on. You can see this in your analytics, even. Views come from all sorts of people and all sorts of places.
There are views, and then there are views, you feel me? No? Alright, well I’ll explain.