YouTube businesses: a tale of two strategies

Let's settle this once and for all

The longer you work in the YouTube space, the more people you get to know within that space. Most of them - all of them, in my experience - are lovely people. They share trade secrets, swap contacts, and advise if you’re searching for an answer to something.

I hope I’ve been able to do the same for others now that I’m ensconced in this world.

Just like any industry, there’s always a rumble or two behind the scenes; something people ‘in the know’ are firmly in the know about, and about which there’s a right old stink being generated.

I think I’ve figured one particular grumble out, though. Although, arguably, it’s the biggest of the lot.

If you ever come across a YouTube video with hundreds of thousands of views and twelve comments, there’s a reason for that disparity in engagement: those views have probably been purchased. In fact, let’s not beat around the bush: they have been purchased.

Let me back up a bit. You may not be aware that YouTube offers two ways to gain views on a video. The first is the old-fashioned organic method where you publish a video and wait for viewers to arrive. To tempt them in, you’ll need a great thumbnail and title combo, strategic timing, and a sprinkling of good luck. It’s the way I’ve built Mark Ellis Reviews right from the very start and it’s a long, exciting, and sometimes frustrating journey.

The second method is to use the Promotions feature in YouTube Studio. This is where you give YouTube some money and choose one of the following goals:

After choosing the regions in which you’d like your video to be promoted, YouTube gets to work. What YouTube does, exactly, is anyone’s guess, but I can confirm that it does result in more of whatever it is you’ve asked for. I’ve seen this first hand, once, with a video that a brand paid to promote on my channel. A piece of content that would, at best, have scored a couple of thousand views, cracked the 20,000 view barrier - fast. And, no, there were barely any comments to speak of.

As you might suspect, the latter option for growth on YouTube provides the fastest route to more views and more subscribers (depending on the goal you choose). This can result in channels which rise to that magical 100,000 subscriber milestone astronomically quickly. It can also attract brand deals, fast. You might understand, therefore, why an increasing number of creators are choosing this method. Why, after all, spend years growing your channel the slow way?

Understandably, a lot of my YouTuber mates are pissed off about this. I have been, too. We have spent those long, hard - yet enjoyable - years working our arses off. Every subscriber gained has been the result of that hard work. Every 1/10 video is a huge achievement to be celebrated, and every 10/10 video still cuts like a warm knife through piping hot butter. When you put that kind of effort in, it’s hard not to feel that those who are taking the shorter route are cheating.

This is where things get a little more complicated.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of marketing strategies that are deployed by brands. The first is based solely on selling stuff and gaining as much return on investment (ROI) with marketing as possible. For instance, you’ve got a £10K marketing budget, and you expect to make a profit of £30K from your campaign, thus comfortably covering the marketing spend and keeping plenty of dosh in the company bank account. Happy days.

The second strategy is awareness. You’ve got a new product - or one that’s in the pipeline - and you want to make a significant noise about it. You want your brand’s name, and that of your product, to make its way out into the world and become recognised by your target market. You want your email list to grow, and your competitors to be aware of the fact that you’re on the scene and you mean business. Sales that result from this endeavour are a bonus.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. These two marketing strategies can be linked squarely to one of the two YouTube growth strategies I noted earlier. If you want to sell your product, you invest in influencer marketing which can deliver clicks that can be turned into leads and, eventually, converted into sales. You’ll only get that at a volume that offers positive ROI if you work with creators who have painstakingly built audiences organically and which consist of people who trust the creator. You won’t get the same results with a purchased audience; they don’t engage with the content at all - most barely watch a couple of seconds of it.

You might argue that a purchased audience on YouTube is similar to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google, but I’d argue they are polar opposites. With PPC ads, you can precisely target a very specific audience. If you instead place those marketing dollars with a creator who has used their means to build a completely random audience, you have no idea who is seeing your product. It is the marketing equivalent of pissing into the wind.

However, if you want to raise awareness of your brand or products, there’s a great argument to opt for influencer marketing that focuses on creators who have quickly established massive followings - however, they’ve done it. Remember, those numbers you want to generate are for impressing shareholders, for adding to your marketing material, and for shouting about how many eyes have been on your stuff.

The good news for creators on either side of the audience-building fence is that there is space for both approaches, and there always will be. New brands will want exposure, and those who are focused on selling stuff aren’t going anywhere. There will, of course, be brands that sit in the latter bracket but who inadvertently end up working with the wrong bunch of creators simply because they’ve been blinded by the bright lights of large subscriber numbers and colossal view counts. But that’s on them - they’ll soon realise their mistake when their marketing campaign delivers negative ROI.

The best advice I can give to any creator who feels perturbed, angered, or simply disincentivised by the rise of the View Farming Creator is to concentrate on their patch. Your audience and the brands you could be working with are going nowhere. Do your thing. Keep growing slowly and steadily. Keep providing brand partners with leads and sales. Ignore everyone else - trust me, you’ll be a lot happier.