The far bigger problem from my POV which is not described in the article is manipulation of YouTube trends. This is to some extent related to buying views but n

The far bigger problem from my POV which is not described in the article is manipulation of YouTube trends. This is to some extent related to buying views but needs a special kind of attention. A few weeks back I noticed weird videos in the German YouTube trends, things like "cheap iPhone cases buy now" with channels that had zero subs. A day later there were 3 of these videos in the trends, the next day 6, then 50% of the trends were full of this. A guy with 0 subs even made a video explaining that he does this kind of manipulation for a living...and unsurprisingly the video made it into the trends the same day. Simply buying views has very little effect (except on maybe advertisers that pay you) but gaining massive exposure through being featured in the trending videos is big.