In my experience YouTube Ads aren't that great to build an audience, since the CTR is super low (even compared to normal display ads). I have botted dozens of accounts for monetization and never had any real issues and can only recommend it to others. Sure, it's more sustatinable to build up your audience so you get there naturally, but this might take too much time. Time where you're potentially losing a lot of revenue, bc your're not monetized yet.
alot of misinformation.
your channel won't be penalized from botting views, maybe 8 years ago sure.
youtube realized that random people can penalize their competitors or anyone, which is bad, so it's been fixed.
the worst that could happen is the views being removed and the watch time hours drop.
just find a reliable panel in the marketplace, look for the ones that are always at the top getting the most replies (the most active.)
the only thing I wouldn't recommend is botting subs.
the reason why is because they won't engage with your videos.
but only 1k botted subs won't affect your channel too much since you're just starting out.
Youtube can definitely terminate channels that have been botted. It has happened to me multiple times.
It's different when you have a channel that gets tens of thousands of organic views with some botted traffic on top compared to a small or newly made channel that got 95% of it's watch time and subs from botted views. It's all about the volume and purpose. They can see this.
that's strange, I can see if you're making copyrighted or videos that get removed from YouTube. but botted traffic should not cause channel termination. that would be a terrible practice since many people can screw over small channels.
maybe it's the content you were making that caused it, I doubt it's from views that were botted.
I have also monetized my channel myself in this way and it is 100% safe. YouTube does not see where you have taken views and how you have gained subscribers. But do not do this after getting monetized or else the channel will be demonetized.
as
@russ11 mentioned there is a lot of misinformation on this thread.
let me speak by experience and multiple test cases to confirm this.
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"Youtube can definitely terminate channels that have been botted. It has happened to me multiple times."
while this used to happen years ago and also goes as per youtubes policy, such things dont happen.
even if it did, it would be super rare.
me and several of others have already tried multiple methods of fake subs or fake engagements,
and there have been zero termination cases, specifically, on that basis, in the past 4 years.
if we had experienced any terminations in the past, it had only been for other violations, such as , copyrighted content, spam, comment spam etc,
but never for fake engagement.
in isolated tests, where the channels were run with only fake engagement but no other violations, terminations have never occurred .
if you assert that, your statement is true, lets put it to the test right now on a few dummy channels, by sending some fake engagement, and see if they get terminated.
if this were the case, banning competitors would be a breeze.
this would lead to chaos and turn into some zombie war.
getting banned for copyright or other violations is usually possible but not for fake engagement.
from experience, i would say, the latter is very unlikely.
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I have also monetized my channel myself in this way and it is 100% safe. YouTube does not see where you have taken views and how you have gained subscribers. But do not do this after getting monetized or else the channel will be demonetized.
you will not get demonetized for fake views.
if it did happen, its usually for other reasons, but people tend to co relate demonetizations to botting.
people usually make these conclusions from 1 or 2 channels or maybe a few, instead of running isolated tests on a larger number of channels to see the bigger picture.
in many cases, if botting is heavy, it will lead to adsense bans for invalid click activity.
first you could have several detections of botted views > followed by multiple occasions of money removals > and then adsense bans.
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"couldn't someone just send over botted traffic to someone monetized channel and get their AdSense banned?"
@russ11
so just to clear your doubts. we have run further tests on the same.
while what you said is true to a certain degree and which i even agree upon, it is infact possible to get adsense banned with fake/botted views.
the chances of this happening is quite low and requires certain patterns.
but i will explain how and why it is still possible, based on tests and multiple case reports from others.
to a certain degree, sending fake botted viewd to a youtube channel will do nothing.
this will cover up most of the cases and keep people protected from most "quick" competitor attack attempts.
its a threshold level that is kept and if you cross that , you can expect to get your adsense disabled.
the issue will start to happen if you bot a large amount of views and especially those that are monetizable bot views, over extended periods of time.
they keyword here is "long term botting".
certain bots bypass youtube detection algorithms temporarily. and you can earn money from it.
the money will stay in your account, but usually by the end of the month, adsense payouts can undergo final audits.
this is when money made from bots will get removed and multiple removals will trigger an adsense ban.
but the randomization patterns in most bots, even the best ones, are far from near human like emulation, that can represent an actual human being.
its not really heard for yt, fb and other big companies to detect this.
unless the botting system itself is using machine learning AI, studies humans and emulates their behaviour to trick algorithms into believing that it is an actual human .
so ,while these bots might bypass, youtube's algorithms to register as views and earn money, & those views might mostly stick,
just dont expect to keep the money made from those botted views.
it will eventually get removed.
vietnam spammers used to bot ads and get away with millions of fake views.
eventually yt upped their algos years back and also shut down many mcns that had channels making money purely off adbots.
but these have a hard time working anymore.
so , yes you can use this as a negative SEO attack on competitors,
but the threshold bar is pretty high, such that no competitor would waste their time, money and resources to send fake monetizable views to their competitors for extended periods of time.
it is an expensive deal.
and also this is effecting cases, only where the botted views are advanced, evading youtube anti bot algorithms and also allowing you to make money from ads (aka monetizable bot views).
if the botted views themselves are low quality & detected immediately, you will not earn money from it in the first place.
these quickly detected views , might usually stick but wont make you any money.
they are usually used to just give a boost to the channel to get suggested, nothing more.
and you can earn money from real humans, who watch your video from youtube recommendations.
such views should not cause problems for adsense.
just take caution if the views are monetizable(as there are limits).
In general terms, you are mostly safe from adsense bans.
so to conclude, personal AdSense accounts are not whitelisted and could be subject to negative seo attacks and bans with a large amount of fake monetizable views.
but yes this is only a problem for blackhat botters, who bot large amounts to make their living off it(such as russians)
for such cases , the fix is joining an MCN network.
an MCN network has whitelisted Business adsense accounts.
no amounts of fake views(even monetizable), will get it banned(as protection).
this is because MCN is home to many creators' channels.
so fake views attack would put everyone's channel at stake.
for this reason MCN adsense accounts are whitelisted(protection given byt YT).
just a hint to note:
MCN networks are botters Nest. most of them join MCN's to spam yt with monetizable views, coming from their botnets.
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"In my experience YouTube Ads aren't that great to build an audience, since the CTR is super low (even compared to normal display ads)."
@Priince1337
ok so let me address this and give you a little secret that is otherwise not well known.
if you know how to effectively run optimized ads with good content & thumbnails and proper targeting,
ads is infact one of the best pay to win methods to grow your channel and build targeted niche based audience.
ill drop one more hint from my experience and connections.
companies who are adding channels to the platform and making studio quality content, do not have time to rely on some algorithm "luck" or "grinding" ,
they use ads to kickstart channels, gain traction and build them
the only caveat here is, you need a high budget.
but it is effective.
people usually go with blackhat botting methods , since it is cheaper.
but then, in this case it is a cat and mouse game.
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