Avoid This New YouTube Feature
Heads up that YouTube recently rolled out something very tempting – called “YouTube Promote.”
It lets you run paid views to your videos without touching the complicated Google Ads system.
It’s simple, slick, and starts at just five bucks.
In other words, you can slowly wreck your organic views for the cost of a latte.
If you don’t already know my stance on this -
Driving paid views (a.k.a. “cold traffic”) to your YouTube videos seems to confuse the algorithm because it doesn’t understand who those viewers are.
And over time, this erodes your ability to get organic views on future content.
Run enough ads, and you will likely get less and less organic views, until your future videos can become algorithmically... dead-on-arrival.
In other words, your channel can become "pay-to-play" forever.
Look at most company or corporate channels and you'll see what I mean. Some videos on a given channel will have, say 120,000 views (paid), while other videos will have just 120 views (organic).
Yet the channel has 664,000 subscribers. It's bizarre, and very common.
To be clear, I'm sure the teams behind Promote had good intentions.
But in my opinion after 10 years on the inside, this is a Google revenue move, not a YouTube creator growth move. (And you can guess which team carries more weight internally.)
Of course their 35-slide Promote Playbook deck includes a few success stories. But if you click into those channels, you’ll see videos with low, inconsistent views, and in one case, a channel that hasn't uploaded in seven months. Not exactly inspiring.
YouTube’s “Promote” Playbook PDF
What to do instead:
Put the corporate credit card away.
Make videos that deliver a ton of value.
Be patient, and build your channel like you have no ad budget at all – the creator way.
That’s the kind of strategy that grows a healthy channel, with long-term traction.
“But Matt, we have the budget! Is there any OK way to run paid traffic?”
We're still testing which paid levers are the least damaging.
So far, it's possible that "In-Feed Ads" are less problematic in that they display your promoted video alongside Suggested videos, so viewers have to choose to watch. (And choosing is a good thing.)
We're also looking into the tactic of driving ad traffic to your channel page vs. an actual video URL. That way, again, the user makes an overt choice, vs. being force-fed your videos via an ad.
But the data is foggy, and until we can make a confident recommendation, we suggest that you just stick to all-organic methods, and use your budget to make better videos.
Need help?
On top of strategy, we've recently expanded into video packaging (thumbnails/titles) and full channel management. We're here if you need us - just fill out this interest form.
