... well yes, actually. I just clicked on a link to a YouTube vid. Why I did it I don't know. I knew it was going to be awful and I knew it would depress me. It was terrible! It had one and a half million views. How the hell it got that I don't know. Fiddle, well known tune, ordinary looking young woman. Dreadful, dreadful playing. Terrible 'arrangement'.

Now, firstly, I'm jealous - how did it get that many views? But secondly, from a practical point of view, what's the difference with that video, and how does one replicate it? I kind of get it when there is a strikingly attractive (to most people's eyes, not necessarily to mine) young woman playing something. People fawn over it and say how marvellous it is. The same thing seems to happen with a particular sort of gooily 'handsome' middle aged male (Andre Rieu, for instance), so it's not just young women who are creating that effect. This was a video of an ordinary looking person playing badly, as so many of these videos are. So is there something else in these videos that draws people?

I'm not going to give a link, or confirm which video it might be if people are tempted to guess. There's no need. There are hundreds of these things out there, gathering views by the million.

Meanwhile, I saw something the other day - I think someone on here may have linked to it - which was totally brilliant and 'only' got two and half thousand views*. Now, that's pretty good, but it's not the one and a half million that the totally sh!te one got ...




* Oh, and by the way, I am totally jealous of that one, but that's because of her fantastic fiddling!

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You can pay people to click to your video and to share it. It's just promotion. You can pay people to put it on facebook, or tweet it, and then somebody retweets it, reposts it. It's just like the practice of hiring clappers in the 19th century

Call me naive, but would people actually do that?

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

People do it ALL THE TIME. Youtube can be configured to pay you if you allow ads. Getting your video to "go viral" can be lucrative. I have no idea if that's the case with the video you're describing though.


https://buyviewsreview.com/top-10-myths ... ube-views/

More views then the more likely people are going to also watch it.

FYI, you can also buy Social Media followers. (For example: https://intertwitter.com)

it's not uncommon in the publishing world, too. There have been instances of both traditional and self published authors buying up their own books to push them onto bestseller lists. The hope being that being on those lists would provide enough momentum to move enough legitimate copies to make the cheating worth it.

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Interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that people might pay for other people to click on things. I wonder how much it costs? Don't get me wrong, I would never do that, as it seems like it's cheating, and i wouldn't feel at all good about it. But it is interesting to know what people are prepared to do to get the number of views up. It leaves me wondering, though ... why? Just for money? The chance of getting advertising revenue back from it 'going viral'? Really? I mean, it just seems so pointless to me ...

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Or envious?

I agree with your sentiments though. It would be interesting to study the demographics of the views of the video(s). Are some societies or parts of societies over or under represented? Are cultures with more participatory music scenes more discerning in their likes?

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Phill

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Often you will find really crap videos go viral just because they are crap, there's a sub culture that loves to show them off.

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Keith.
Trying to do justice to my various musical instruments.

Is it the videos drawing people, or is it people being drawn to the videos? How did the link get to you so that you clicked it and added one to its count?

If it's a well known tune lots of people may search for it. Does youtube offer them the ones with most plays first? So they get more plays and providing you at least see the start of the advert, giving the advertiser a chance for it to be watched, they will pay youtube some money. I wonder if youtube logs how many views are not completed and how that would help them make money if it did.

So I think the question to ask yourself is not "Why do people watch it?" but "How did I get the suggestion to watch it?"

If someone puts up a video of a Welsh version of a tune that is probably not known widely across the globe, under its Welsh name, how many people would find it? But where would it be on the list offered by a youtube search if they searched for it?

I think the trouble with these 'tune a day' videos is that most of them are awful so the few that are really good are buried in the rest, especially if they use not so well known tunes.

They did, many years ago when I posted some (probably not very good) videos. They would analyse 'engagement' iirc. This was how long people watched for, and roughly where people got bored and left for something else.
I guess a higher 'engagement' means that advertising is worth more - especially in the later portions of the video.


Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger - original has 25m views, extended 10 hour version has 3.6m views. I think I have figured the tune out out - I only need two more notes.

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Phill

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Boy, am I out of the loop. I ought to rethink my business model.

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

That's simple. But still, puzzling, at least to me. I had been watching a video of some Irish music or other - I forget what - and YouTube put that other one on the side as a suggested video for me. I saw the thumbnail and knew already, at that point, that it would be terrible. And yet ... curiosity got the better of me.

This seems to lend credence to the notion that the original high count was stimulated in some way, possibly by being paid for, I suppose. Then, once a high count is established, maybe YouTube takes the tags and just throws them up when people watch something 'similar'.

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Still having no idea what video you are talking about I have to suspect that in addition to somebody paying it into the starting lineup it may be speaking to a different audience than you. Sometimes I get stuff that's meant for my daughter, age 13. It's possible the appeal of the videos was never the woman's musicianship but was always something else that you're missing, because it's not targeted at your demographic, even though there's some overlap. Like maybe it's about clothes, or she has a following from some other thing she does and the fiddle playing is just an exception

That's interesting. I suppose that is a possibility. It's certainly one that hadn't occurred to me.

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