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Yes and no. To give an example, people have been cheating at YouTube for ages with viewbotting, but Mr. Beast managed to smash the viewership of any of those p

Yes and no. To give an example, people have been cheating at YouTube for ages with viewbotting, but Mr. Beast managed to smash the viewership of any of those people by using YouTube’s analytics to crush the algorithm. Also as you scale up, the less viable the strategy becomes due to risk of exposure. The idea that any creator or advertiser NOT buying views is “almost certainly a loser by default” is an exaggeration.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> people have been cheating at YouTube for ages with viewbotting, but Mr. Beast managed to smash the viewership of any of those people by using YouTube’s analytics to crush the algorithm. This... doesn't sound much better. In some sense, it's buying view with extra steps. Both methods are about gaming YouTube instead of creating quality content.
- koonsolo 3y ago
  "Quality content" is decided by YouTube's algorithm (viewer retention etc). So no in the end, the winner of the algorithm is the one creating the "quality content". Or in other words, if your viewer retention is terrible, it's probably because your videos are just not that good.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  >Both methods are about gaming YouTube instead of creating quality content. If you scrape away the abstractions for a second, what you will find is Mr. Beast used data to tailor his videos to get his viewers to watch lots of ads and buy lots of products and love his videos and become repeat customers. Mr. Beast is rather transparent about all of this. If you think he’s a creepy manipulative guy, you just don’t watch his content. The whole thing with buying engagement is that you’re confusing the signal. Instead of coming through the legitimate channel where you openly pay for advertising, you intentionally deceive people, you make it just a little bit harder for the poorer and unconnected to achieve social mobility, you pollute a useful signal with false data, and you do a large number of things which annoy netizens in particular. All I’m just saying, is that there’s more than one path to be successful. I know people who used cert dumps on the pretence that everybody else is doing it and they won’t put themselves behind, and I know others who literally just did the work and it really didn’t take THAT long in the grand scheme of things and they actually came away having learned something useful at the end of the day. Both kinds of person succeeded.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> people have been cheating at YouTube for ages with viewbotting, but Mr. Beast managed to smash the viewership of any of those people by using YouTube’s analytics to crush the algorithm. This... doesn't sound much better. In some sense, it's buying view with extra steps. Both methods are about gaming YouTube instead of creating quality content.

koonsolo 3y ago
"Quality content" is decided by YouTube's algorithm (viewer retention etc). So no in the end, the winner of the algorithm is the one creating the "quality content". Or in other words, if your viewer retention is terrible, it's probably because your videos are just not that good.
faeriechangling 3y ago
>Both methods are about gaming YouTube instead of creating quality content. If you scrape away the abstractions for a second, what you will find is Mr. Beast used data to tailor his videos to get his viewers to watch lots of ads and buy lots of products and love his videos and become repeat customers. Mr. Beast is rather transparent about all of this. If you think he’s a creepy manipulative guy, you just don’t watch his content. The whole thing with buying engagement is that you’re confusing the signal. Instead of coming through the legitimate channel where you openly pay for advertising, you intentionally deceive people, you make it just a little bit harder for the poorer and unconnected to achieve social mobility, you pollute a useful signal with false data, and you do a large number of things which annoy netizens in particular. All I’m just saying, is that there’s more than one path to be successful. I know people who used cert dumps on the pretence that everybody else is doing it and they won’t put themselves behind, and I know others who literally just did the work and it really didn’t take THAT long in the grand scheme of things and they actually came away having learned something useful at the end of the day. Both kinds of person succeeded.