So there's a website where you can stream tv/movies

their business model in recent months has pivoted from pop windows when you start a video to making you watch an embedded youtube clip for a few seconds before letting you go to your desired media

at the beginning it was things you'd expect, like 3rd world music videos where the company wanted to get paid views to increase exposure, other times it was the intro video of some guru "hey I'm going to teach you how to trade forex" type stuff

but lately it's just been wild stuff that doesn't make any sense at all, like today it's a phillipino family singing karaoke...



discuss

I don't have anything to add but also want to ask:

The amount of paid scam ads on Facebook & IG is incredible. How are they not getting more **** for that?

I've seen this recently too, and I don't really understand this one either! Like, if I were somehow the manager of a band in Malaysia, I think I could come up with 100 more cost-effective ways to grow the audience than showing music videos to a white guy with a US IP address.

Are there tangible benefits to just being able to say "we have X views" (this might explain the Filipino karaoke too)? Is the website they're advertising on so cheap that they don't mind dusting off a few bucks on poorly targeted ads?

yeah the US IP is the odd part because these are almost never in English and Americans are some of the most expensive to target

i kind of miss the music videos, i'd often stick around and let them play out and try to guess the country and language

today it's even better, could tell just from the thumbnail

they are speaking what i assume to be one of the phillipine languages because they have that look and sound and readily mix in full sentences in english - this is how I know "we're ready for our special guest"



and sure enough, the rest of the video after a brief introduction is just this single shot of dental work happening

i am so confused why someone would pay money to a platform to force someone with an LA ip to watch this for the youtube algo

a literal hour of this

My guess is that this traffic is a better alternative to click farms.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/click...154440209.html

Probably, this is how they generate organic looking traffic that the youtube channels buy.

Youtube algos are getting better and better at catching non-organic traffic so an IP from LA and geographically distinct locations makes it harder to identify this as non-organic traffic.

Not an expert in this, but this would make sense.

oh yeah, i mean, why would that phillipino dentist pay what I can only assume is a pretty high rate for this?

I notice these a lot on 123 movies, assuming everyone else is using “XXXX movie” 123 online rather than put locker anymore?

Theoretically, the youtube channel could buy traffic with viewers that click on ads. Then, to make it seem organic, they add additional traffic from the streaming site. This makes business sense as long as the AdSense revenue is more than the cost of this traffic.

I do know of a small channel that almost certainly did that to boost its revenue. Tho that one had a fan base already and wasn't like some rando Phillipino dentist. Some people who hated the guy contacted youtube, but they didn't care.

I also know of another channel that currently has 500K subscribers. I watched it form the beginning and the guy hustled hard, but also admitted to buying traffic. He would have made it anyways, but this sped things up.

Some channels might just be happy with a few thousand views to seem somewhat important in case clients google them. Increasing youtube traffic could also be part of SEO optimization.

Finally, traffic goes to the highest bidder. Informed customers probably know (or quickly realize) that this traffic is not worth much so that's how some guy from the US ends up watching a third world dentist. Some people who buy the traffic don't realize that it is worthless.

Oldish article on this:

'They can't stop it': Inside the thriving business of selling fake YouTube video views