Botting YouTube – A Fool’s Game
Hello,
Long time lurker here, first time poster. Created this account to share some of my recent findings about the title topic. Because I recently completed my experiment, I felt confident in my findings and hope they may be of use to some of you.
Today I come to share with you my research. The many things I’ve learned and discoveries I’ve made in my recent quest to get more views sent to my channel. This may be a little bit lengthy, but if you stick around until the end, it’ll be worth it.
A short background story
Before we begin, I want to tell you a little bit about myself and how this whole thing started.
In 2019 I started my YouTube channel, and within a few weeks I had hit the markers necessary for monetization. Hitting 1,000 subs and 4,000 watch hours was almost too simple, but attaining monetization and partnership proved to be more difficult than expected. I had gotten partnership in my second month of daily posting, and within a week they turned it off. Content in the channel was flagged as re-used content and because of that monetization was taken away. It didn’t matter that I was the number 1 ranking channel in my niche. It didn’t matter that I had grown the channel to almost 4 million organic views in 3 months. They said re-used content, took away monetization and I had to rethink my content strategy.
The worst part about getting flagged for re-used content when all your content is similar to each other is that you’re not sure which video/s got flagged. As was the case with me, YouTube didn’t provide any more information than re-used content, so I eventually had to delete all my videos and try again. In the next year, I would end up deleting all my videos one more time.
I tell you this because I want to show that I’ve been able to grow a channel organically 3 times from scratch and get it to the top of the niche. And even after I deleted almost 6 million organic views in total, I had been able to grow that channel back to the point where I had earned around $20,000 in the last 2-3 months of 2020 alone.
On the first day of the year, I received a message saying monetization was paused on the channel due to re-used content again. Now after I resolved that situation and started posting videos again. My views was not reaching anywhere near the levels it was a few months earlier. And when I checked the search results, my videos weren’t showing up because there were several brand new channels (3-6days old) that had 20-40k views on their videos overnight.
This was most obviously botted views, but their views stuck and they were ranking all their videos. So I, in my frustration and impatience, decided to figure out how they were doing it, what software they were using and how to do the same to at least be on a level playing field with these new channels.
Entering the Dark Side
**This isn’t meant to be a guide on how to bot YouTube. In reality, I hope this to be a cautionary tale for those of you who are looking to viewbot your way to the top. That unless you’re dedicated, and have a good amount of money to spend, don’t even attempt this.**
Now it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to see how the big G could be monitoring this forum for the latest exploits that people share here, and because of that, I won’t go into any specifics or details about what I’m going to disclose here. I’m going to keep everything general, but I’ll try to be as thorough as possible. Just to shed some light on some topics for those of you who have already begun the journey but are still stumbling through.
The real reason I decided to write this is because of one of the posts I’ve read about how the algorithm works to rank your videos and SMM panels and that stuff. There are many misconceptions about how the algorithm works and how SMM panels get their views in, and whether or not they benefit the channel.
This research has cost me just a little bit over $12,000 since February. So please, if you’re considering doing something similar, ask yourself if this is something that you can spend that sort of money on. To me it started out as an experiment, but had I known then that it would have cost me this much, I probably wouldn’t have ever attempted it to begin with. And it’s not just money that I spent, but time and energy. And doing the tests, and the many different attempts made were quite stressful and taxing on myself these last 3-4 months.
Oh, but the things I’ve learned!
Now Where To Begin?
When you decide to try view botting a platform like YouTube, there are no guides. No one teaches you anything. You have to learn on your own. Those that know, don’t want to reveal their secret, in fear that their money-making tactics will get patched, and those that don’t know assume it’s one way, when it’s something else entirely.
When I started, I didn’t know anything about any of this. I didn’t understand what a proxy was, the role it played, and how to get it. Not to mention the amount of providers out there with their own price structures and website dashboards.
I just thought you buy a viewbot, turn it on, and wait for the views to show up. Oh, how naïve I was. But that’s what I thought and that’s what I did.
I did some digging online, followed a couple clues I picked up in my research and came upon the first bot that I purchased. Now, I want to make a little disclaimer. Like I mentioned earlier, I have purchased all the bots that are currently out there right now. But again, because the big G might be monitoring this, I will not divulge any names of the software I use. If I was able to find it online, you can too. Now if you have any specific bots in mind, you can ask me here or in PM what my thoughts are about it and I will tell you my honest opinion. But you will need to be the one to mention the bot name, because I don’t feel like it’s necessary to enumerate every bot that I ended up purchasing. But having said that, I feel the need to disclose the name of the first bot I got, because of what would eventually happen after I operated it.
This software was called, “AnhAnh Software: Autoviewer”, cost about $300, and on their sales page alongside a video or two, had promised features and documentation on running the bot upon purchase.
So I did. I purchased the bot, as well as the accompanying referred proxies from the preferred provider and I was off!
Being a newbie and fresh to this whole scene, when I started I made the first fatal error. I tried it on my real channel. For those of you trying this for the first time, DON’T USE YOUR REAL CHANNEL! Especially in the beginning when practicing and experimenting with the software, don’t use your real channel while working out the kinks. Because this does several things to your channel and puts you under the algorithm’s scope. So practice on a random channel that has no connection to your real one.
So I ran AnhAnh software for a week or two, while trying the different proxy providers found here on the forum and around the net. Unfortunately, the views wouldn’t show up on analytics, and if they did they would slowly disappear one by one. Or what’s known in the botting circle as “Dropped Views”.
From the get-go the software was difficult to run. There was no accompanying documentation as promised and no other features in the software as stated in the sales page. Overall, it was a dud. And upon asking for customer support from the AnhAnh software website, they wouldn’t respond to my queries and eventually stopped responding altogether when I was asking for help running the software.
This caused me to ask for refund through paypal, since they weren’t replying to me. This took several days to process and in the meantime, I was frustrated trying to run the software and went out hunting for other software to fulfil the needs of the experiment.
I bought two, three, four other bots.. Many of them work to some capacity but none to the extent that it would allow me to rise back in the rankings for my specific keyword/tag—which had become quite competitive—so I kept searching for the perfect bot that could do what I needed.
After a few weeks of this, I got a message from Paypal, where they said that they sided with me on the payment dispute of the AnhAnh software and they will credit the $300 back into my account. Oh happy day! Or so I thought. When I went to bed, all was well in the world. When I woke up, my world was turned upside down.
My computer had been wiped. All files remained but they were empty. I had been hacked. The AnhAnh autoviewer software was a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) and with it, being angry with me for getting a refund on his defective software, he hacked my computer, deleted my files and left me starting from scratch.
Now you may say revert to a previous backup or something, but all of those restore points were deleted too. I had to start from scratch. Reformatted my computer, downloaded and installed a new copy of windows… The works. So if you’re reading this post now AnhAnh, go eat a bag of dicks. And for those of you considering buying his software, or if you currently have it installed on your PC, I would delete it and stay away. Create a backup not connected to your system, and be careful with this software.
At this point, it was the end of March, start of April and I was starting with a fresh computer. I had just learned the importance of getting a VPS (virtual private server) and installing all the bots there.
By this time I had already spent close to $3k on the bots and proxies and VPS and the costs were mounting fast. None of the bots I bought could really do what I needed. Bits and pieces of each worked, but it was difficult running many different instances and software at the same time, and still without fail, the views still disappear after some time. But some views stuck… and then I realized if I could figure out what made those views stick while others disappeared, I could replicate the function and scale it up.
But still, I was buying all the bots I could find. Each promised the ability to rank the channel and send views that would stick and each failed at being consistent. But with each bot, I learned something new about how the whole thing worked. It was like each was a piece of an overall puzzle I didn’t realize I was solving.
It was the end of April-start of May, I was 14 bots in, a member in almost all the proxy provider websites around and had spent just a little bit over $6k in this experiment. And because I was so focused on this experiment, my channel content creation and frequency of new uploads started to slow down.
So it wasn’t working out as I expected and in reality I should have just taken the hit and cut my losses.
But I believed that I had discovered the answer. And I was already committed. So instead of pulling out, I doubled down.
Developing Greatness
Like I mentioned earlier, many of the bots, while not working perfectly as expected, had things about them that worked well. But it was hard running many bots on the same VPS at the same time, no matter how optimized or powerful the VPS is, it’s hard to run all the bots simultaneously. So I thought, that if I could just get all the functions that work well from each bot, and put them together in one software, I would have the holy grail.
So I searched for bot devs, shared my ideas and found one that wanted to work on the project. But his quote was $6k for the development. Like I mentioned earlier, I should have cut my losses and just dropped the whole thing, but part of me wanted to see if my theories were true and if my proposed software idea could actually do what I envisioned it to. So I took the leap, accepted the arrangement and paid him half up front to develop the software.
Now I’m glad to announce that after waiting a few weeks, I’d finally heard back from him. The software was ready, running in its beta state. And after I paid the remaining balance, he sent me a copy of the software and I am very pleased with the results. My research and experimentation paid off and I now have the most advanced software found anywhere.
And so just like a puzzle, you need to understand the pieces before you can see the whole. And I’m here to share with you some of the puzzle pieces I’ve discovered, so they may assist you, should you choose to pursue this perilous quest on your own.
Since this write-up is already over a couple thousand words long. I’ll try to keep the next part brief.
This is a short overview of some of the essential things needed to succeed on this quest.
-Proxies
-Dummy Accounts / Channels
-A reliable bot
-Stable forms of traffic
- Proxies
Proxies are atop this list because of how important they are. In this quest, you will be using a lot of proxies, joining a lot of proxy websites and requesting many free tests. ALWAYS TAKE THE FREE TEST—if you see an option for it. Many websites offer options like 3-day refunds, a certain amount of free bandwidth per account, or a limited time to try out if their proxies work for your need. The ones that you are looking for are proxies for YT traffic.
Many websites offer YT packages, but a large percentage of these proxies don’t work for YT traffic just for account management. Account management proxies are good for stuff like account creation, leaving comments, likes and subs. But YT traffic proxies are necessary for views.
The proxies you will want will most often need to be residential proxies, if you want your views to stick. Depending on the bot you use, you may be able to use data center proxies for your needs, but this only works if your bot is quite advanced, and the chances of view drops are higher. In my opinion and tests, residential proxies are really what I would suggest you use. These proxies come in rotating and static and each works for specific functions.
A metric that you can use to see how good a proxy works for your need, is to see if the views show up in analytics. The best proxies show up instantly, while others may show up within a day, sometimes it even takes up to 2-3 days for them to show up. So always keep an eye on your analytics and keep a journal with notes about which proxy you are using at what time, so you can compare your notes with your analytics and see your drop rate and which are the most effective proxies and forms of traffic.
One last note about proxies.. This can get very expensive. So I need to reiterate my point of trying to always get a trial run.
- Dummy accounts/channel
Like I mentioned earlier, DON’T TEST ON YOUR REAL CHANNEL. This is a very important thing to remember because if you are navigating these unknown waters like I did—by stumbling your way through—you are bound to do some things in your tests that could alert YT to your efforts and they will start to keep an eye on your channel. This makes it a lot more difficult to test your theories, and to slip it by them.
So make sure to always use a dummy channel not tied to your real channel in any way. Don’t use the same phone number that you used on your real channel, don’t tie it to any email address that you really use. Keep it untraceable. And if, during your tests, you notice that YT has consistently been removing a majority of views that you sent to the channel, and then it may be time to dump that channel and try on a new account.
And it’s also important to have these accounts if your bot has YT log in feature. This will be necessary to leave comments, likes and gain subs. Personally, while I have over 100 aged accounts, I don’t use this feature, as I didn’t include it in my bot design. My rationale is, that a majority of viewers aren’t logged in and having most of your watch time primarily come from logged in accounts looks might suspicious. But many people say that this is the secret in getting your views to stick—Views with logged in accounts—but I think differently. From my research, what I’ve discovered as the way to get views to stick is through your view method and traffic source.
- A Reliable Bot – Caveat Emptor
Upon my last count, I had purchased 15 bots. 14 publicly sold bots and 1 custom-made private bot. If you were to look at my bills and then at the graveyard of all these bots, you might think, “What a waste!”, or maybe that it was a mistake to buy all the bots in the market while on my quest. But I don’t see it that way. Like I mentioned earlier, each bot was a piece of the overall puzzle. And while there was no magic bot that could do it all, each of them had certain things about them that worked well.
So it is my recommendation that if you were to try something like this, do your research first and check to see if the bot that you’re looking at can perform the functions that you need, and most importantly—which we will discuss in the next part—what forms of traffic it can provide.
Bots can get expensive also, especially if you make it a point to buy them all to see which is best. In reality, there is no “best” among the public bots out now in the market. But while they may cost a pretty penny, finally purchasing the bot is usually a one-time thing. So there are no recurring costs to think about.
But we have to remember going into this that YT and the big G are no fools. These are billion dollar companies with full teams of people. So if there is a bot out there being publicly sold, the chances that they have purchased and reversed engineered this bot and patched the holes that it exploits is quite high. This is why something like a CTR (click-through rate) bot that promises better ranking doesn’t work as expected, or as the sales page advertises.
Expect to pay something in the range of $250-$500 for a good public bot, or up to $6k-$12k for a customized private bot/farm. Of course there are cheaper bots under $100, but I would steer clear of them. They either don’t work, or have hidden code that uses up your CPU.
- Stable forms of Traffic
Now we get to the part which I feel is the most overlooked and unmentioned aspect of this whole thing, traffic type. Whenever people talk about these things like buying views through an SMM panel or running viewbots themselves, most often—if they are using the publicly found bots—the views will show up in analytics in 1 out of 3 ways.
-Direct/Unknown
-External/Embedded
-Search result
And with these forms of traffic, they look to rank their videos.
Like we mentioned in the last part, YT and the big G are no fools and they have become very stringent on what they count as accepted views or what they call “engagement events”. Because of this and the fact that many/most of the bots out today provide traffic source as either one of the three listed above, YT algorithm scrutinizes these views the most, which is why it’s hard to get these views to stick, unless you can actually get it embedded in a PBN and have your bot watch it through those links or you use an API bot.
I, myself, am more particular to suggested and browse views, as I feel these are the least scrutinized of all the traffic methods and from my research, the ones least likely to drop. So if you can find a bot—or in my case, have one made—that can do this then you’ll have an easier time getting your views to stick.
How to get these other types of views? Now that’s the secret that you’ll need to discover.
The beauty here is that when you get the perfect mix of a good, reliable bot with a steady stable form of traffic, you’ll be able to get your views to stick without the need for expensive residential proxies, or even logged in accounts. Data center proxies will do.
That’s it for now. This is the accumulation of four months of research and an ungodly amount of money spent on this experiment. I hope this has been helpful and if you choose to continue on this quest—good luck and Godspeed.
Stay safe.
R.L.Stein
