So recently I had a video made I was pretty proud of. Originally it had about 500 views on YouTube from posting it on a few newsgroups & what not, which I don’t think is bad for a studio project that has been more or less defunct a few years. But I thought it had more potential.
So I experimented with using the YouTube/Google Adwords promotions to publicize the video. I was familiar with how quick the money can add up on those kind of campaigns, so I low-balled at $0.01 per click & a budget of $1.00 a day.
The result over two months was spending $52.20 (pretty close to the $1 a day budget) providing the additional 5,220 views that would be directly caused by this. After the two months the video only hit about 5,800 views & now (two months after closing the ad campaign) the video just hit 6,000 views. Which means essentially no one who clicked an advertisement to watch the video shared it with anyone. Also there has not been any type of sales spike associated with the video views. (I’d hoped for a sales increase near the level to pay for the ads - a 0.1% click through to purchase sounds reasonable….)
So what’s the moral of my story? That paying for views doesn’t create any sort of true buzz for a band or generate revenue? Maybe. But I can tell you this for sure, if you want to generate 10,000 views of your video on YouTube, it’s as easy as spending $100 & I believe (though I haven’t tested the theory yet) that if you want to try to use an advertisement campaign as an attempt to make a video go viral you should probably invest all the money over a two day instead of two month period. I’ll report back when I’ve tried that experiment. Let me know what tools you’ve used to push your videos.
If you’re interested, here is the video:
Brian John Mitchell runs Silber Records & the webzine QRD & makes music as Remora, Vlor, & Small Life Form.