Client is being approached by company claiming to get lots of video views

[Laurean]

It sounds like a scam to me, especially since they are getting 12,000 hits in the first week and no comments!

https://www.youtube.com/user/FollowMediaVideos?feature=watch

Thoughts from my SEO community, please?

[danatanseo]

Hi Laurean,

Wow! Gross YouTube Spam, definitely.   As they say "If something seems too good to be true...." - A million views and no comments? It makes me wonder how much they are charging for their services and how much they are paying some poor schmuck to sit their and click "view video." My advice to your client would be "Run away!"

Dana

[Laurean]

Dana, That was my first thought to.. like a robot... but they said they already received 5 valid phone calls.... maybe prank calls to prove?  They were offering 90 days for free before paying.  I don't even think HubSpot or Mashable can get results like that!

[Asher]

there is a thing called microworkers where you pay like 1 cent per view or something low like that.  However, these microworkers are real people with real interests and you never know who is on it, so it could have generated some actual business.  That would be the only way I could think of if it generated business.  However, that is very spammy, i would tell your clients to not engage and let them do the free work while not paying for it.  Otherwise "buyer beware"

[adventurenick]

Very spammy, and videos with fake views stand a pretty good chance of getting removed from Youtube eventually

[danatanseo]

Another thing to consider is what kind of businesses this "FollowMe" site sells their services to. It seems to me they are willing to sell to anyone. That means they might end up posting videos from one of your client's competitors along with their's. That's not a good scenario at all. They'd be much better off cultivating their own branded YouTube channel.

[Laurean]

Thanks for the info on that site.  I checked it out, and that is probably what happened.

[Laurean]

Does YouTube do that?  If so, that is probably why this YouTube Channel was only created in October 2012.  That alone was a red flag to me!

[Laurean]

TOTALLY AGREED!

"They'd be much better off cultivating their own branded YouTube channel".

Great advice, that's exactly what I'm going to respond with.  Thanks!

[josh-riley]

You were smart enough to know to question this and I hope your client is smart enough to listen to your feedback. Good luck!

[adventurenick]

Youtube definitely will remove views and even the videos occasionally if the views were obtained in a black hat way that goes against their TOS. It's just not worth the risk, and most clever people can tell that there's no way a video about something relatively obscure got so many (real) views so quickly