YouTube Clip Buys Its Own Views

This was an experiment we did last semester w/ Mr. G. Barlow as part of the Internet Famous course at Parsons (season II coming next semester). A couple of things we learned in the process:

1) You can buy your way into awards such as “Most Viewed Per Day/Week/Month” in a given category (in our case How To & Style)
2) Youtube view count vs unique visitors (tracked independently from youtube) match up pretty close when buying famo (44,716 Youtube views and 57,663 unique visitors) .
3) In our experience if you pay for 100,000 visitors it will translate into roughly 45,000 youtube views.
4) If you’re paying to drive traffic to a youtube clip on autoplay you’ll get banned if there is audio.

The stats page is publicly available here if you’re interested in doing further research in famo studies. Original project page here