I tested YouTube's new promotions feature to find the cheapest way to buy 1,000 subscribers now you can find this feature by going to your YouTube Studio then coming down to Content then you want to come across to the promotions tab now before we create a promotion it's important to know that in order to make money on YouTube you need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time now the reason I bring this up is because in this text it says subscribers and watch time earned through a promotion will not count towards the monetization requirements but I actually found something I want to share with you that means our YouTube promotions will bypass this and our subscribers will count towards the monetization program and it's not even against YouTube's terms and conditions so to create a promotion what we're going to do is Click get started from there it's going to ask you to create a Google ads account which you can just follow the steps and do that and at the end of those prompts you're going to end up with a screen that looks like this you're going to click on add to select a video from your videos list and what's going to happen when we run our promotion out YouTube's going to give it more exposure in little ads that kind of look like this right here and when people click on these ads they'll be take to your YouTube video now we're going to hit next here we can select which countries we want our ads to be shown in we can also click on this drop down and select what language we want our viewers to be speaking and then when you hit next the final thing you'll have to do is choose how much money you want to spend and later in this video we'll talk about how much money you should be spending to get 1,000 subscribers but from here all you'd have to do is hit promote and all of a sudden you'd have a new promotion live on your channel but that's what I was going wrong in the beginning because at this point me and my students have run five or six of these campaigns and we found that the right combination of settings can be the difference between spending $12 or over $270 for the same 1,000 subscribers and let me show you what I mean because I found that YouTube promotions are so broken right now and if you can take advantage of them it's literally the fastest cheapest way to get subscribers that I've ever seen and here's what I mean by that so this is one of the first promotions that I've run and if I come in here and click on the pencil icon we can see exactly how I set this up now for this promotion I targeted people who were in Canada United Kingdoms and the United States and those viewers had to be speaking English two weeks later and after running this promotion after after 2 weeks here's what the results looked like again we spent 100 bucks to get about 1.5k views meaning it cost us about $63 to get 1,000 views we also got 241 subscribers meaning that it cost us about $415 to get 1,000 subscribers now this was okay but I wasn't all that impressed so I came back to this Channel and I ran another promotion and in this new promotion what I wanted to do was give YouTube the opportunity to send my video to whoever it thought would be most relevant and would get me the best results so what I did did was I added in every single country that you can add excluding Argentina because for some reason Argentina hate my videos and don't want to run them as ads and also in languages I deselected English and that essentially means this campaign's going out to everyone and anyone at the discretion of the YouTube algorithm and here were the results so I spent $12 to get 7,451 views that means to get 1,000 views it's going to cost me $13.82 a hell of a lot less than our initial $63 right and it gets better because for subscribers my promotion Got7 10 of them meaning that now instead of costing me $415 to get 1,000 subscribers it's only costing me $145 but then I had another idea because not long ago I created a video where I bought 5 million views on YouTube and in that video one of the methods I discovered was creating Google ad campaigns that just send your videos to countries that have very low cpms what this means is that it's very cheap to advertise in those countries because usually the population in those countries have less buying power just the messenger here so then I ran another YouTube promote however this time what I did was I targeted the low value countries that I found in the initial video I just mentioned again no hate against these countries I'm just the messenger here but these countries have the lowest CPM but what I also did to keep it a bit more targeted was add in the language requirement of English so even though people in say Estonia could have my video promoted to them YouTube would have to know that they're decent English speakers in order for that to happen and this is where things start to get fun because I spent $100 and got 10,000 views now that means that for 1,000 views it's only costing me about $9 9.71 I also got 970 subscribers almost 1,000 subscribers from this one $100 promotion meaning that using this method I would only have to spend $103 to get our 1,000 subscribers now at this point I didn't know that there was a way to get these subscribers to actually count towards monetizing our YouTube channel and I'll talk more about that in a sec because first there's a bit of a problem here and that is all of the promotions I've currently been testing have been on the channel you're watching right now which has a bunch of data a bunch of existing viewers and so theoretically the algorithm is going to have a better idea of who to send these promotions to because it has the data of all of my other YouTube videos to learn from so I thought it would only be fair if I take the exact same video I'm testing here and spend $100 on it on a brand new YouTube channel and so that's what I did I came over to good old silky plays which had approximately eight extremely unactive subscribers so I set up a promotion using the method that worked best on my previous channel which is targeting those low CPM countries but restricting our viewers based on whether whether or not they can speak English left it set it to run for 2 weeks and didn't even look at it until a reminder came up on my calendar I came back to the channel I remember sitting down at my desk leisurely flicking over to my YouTube channel and seeing this over 5,000 subscribers and at this point I'm like super skeptic cuz I'm like no way that's actually possible so I come to my YouTube Studio I go to Promotions I see my promotion I click into it and I see it's gotten 22,300 views which is the best result I've got so far even better than the promotions on my large Channel which should have all the data to be able to get cheaper views but hang on a minute it says 2,000 subscribers how does that work my channel has 5,000 subscribers apparently so I thought maybe YouTube's just needing some time to catch up so I gave it a couple of days logged back into my channel checked my live analytics you can see here I go from 7 to 8 subscribers bam up to over 5,000 subscribers from our promotion and yet the promotion itself still says it's only generated me 2,000 subscribers and that's why I started to get excited because I'm like if YouTube is under attributing subscribers here to certain promotions what else is broken so what I did was I came down to my own tab where I can see how close I am to YouTube's monetization requirements and believe it or not I scroll down to eligibility and I see this number 5,160 subscribers and this beautiful full turquoise bar isn't it Majestic now unfortunately it looks like YouTube are true to their word in that the watch hours doesn't actually count towards your eligibility so you're going to have to get those ones on your own but it seems like for now unless YouTube patches this at some point if they do someone leave a comment down below so that other people don't waste their money these subscribers still count towards the monetization eligibility requirements but that still doesn't explain what's going on with our subscribers here because we've got 5,160 subscribers even though our promotion only says 2,000 and I made a post about it in the private Discord that just me and my YouTube students have being like hey guys look what I found if we actually look at the numbers here again we spent 100 bucks we got over 22,000 views which means we're spending about $448 per 1,000 views we also got according to to Promotions 228 subscribers but in reality we actually got 256% more subscribers than YouTube thinks we did and that means that on average is costing us about $19 per 1,000 subscribers and a couple of my students jumped on this as well and I wanted to show you two of their results now if we look at Pete's Channel his promotion said that he got 213 subscribers but when you actually look at his analytics you can see that he got 414 subscribers which is a 194% increase on what this stat says meaning for him it's going to cost about $47 to get 1,000 subscribers another one of my students Tony spent 100 bucks got 7,000 views supposedly according to YouTube promotions got 592 subscribers but in reality when we checked his analytics he actually got 1,021 subscribers which is 172% more and on average he was paying about $99 per 1,000 subscribers now Pete and Tony's results are quite a bit more expensive than mine and the reason for this this is that no offense to them but I think my thumbnail and video is a little bit higher quality which is understandable I've been doing this for a lot longer than them meaning I was able to convert a lot more viewers and so the cost of my promotion is less which again is nothing against them that's the whole reason they're in my private Community is so I can teach them how to be better and that's what we're working on but overall what these experiments have uncovered for us is that there seems to be a subscriber attribution drift where on average YouTube actually sends us about 200% more subscribers than it thinks it is and those subscribers stick around as as well so I actually ran these promotions like a month ago and waited to create this video cuz I thought maybe they'd just all disappear but they haven't they're still there and so summary after running all of these tests on my channels on students channels and spending hundreds of dollars do I think buying 1,000 subscribers with YouTube promotions is worth it for you well firstly if you are going to run promotions you want to do it by targeting low CPM countries which you can go back earlier in this video I'll leave a time stamp on screen to see what those countries I was targeting were and then select your language as English and that's going to get you the cheapest result but just because you're going to cheap legal subscribers doesn't necessarily mean it's actually doing anything to your channel long term what me and my students found across the board is that people who subscribe to you through YouTube promotion regardless of the method you use are really inactive however in saying that if you want the best chance of buying active subscribers The targeted method where you target just the countries that most of your viewers are actually from actually got us the highest sub rate which is the amount of people who subscribe to our Channel per view which is of 31% which means that on average if we get 100 views on this type of promotion we're going to get 31 subscribers and as you can see this is substantially higher than all the other methods we tested however in saying that don't expect anything too crash hot in your analytics this is the analytics of one of the videos we ran promotions on as you can see the average view duration is shocking even though this video got 22,000 views by the time we reach 30 seconds only 10% of those people are actually still watching and by the time we reach about 5 minutes and 30 seconds literally all of them have clicked off and in case you're wondering what Marcus is is that just a terrible video here is this exact same video posted on my Channel with some organic traffic so the blue line here is the organic traffic the pink and orange lines are our paid traffic and what you can see is that at about 30 seconds we still have about 60% of our organic traffic by the time we get to the end of our 7-minute video we still have about 25% of our organic audience still watching which don't get me wrong it's not the best retention in the world but it's nothing that deserves a retention graph like this another thing we looked at when analyzing all these promotions is did doing promotions kicks start the algorithm to start sending us views organically what I found pretty much across the board was no it won't but I also found that buying promotions doesn't seem to kill your organic growth either so all this being said should you actually spend your hard owned money on YouTube promotions well the biggest Revelation in this whole study is that the subscribers gained through promotions actually do count towards your monetization requirements so maybe you already have 3,000 or 4,000 watch hours but you're just waiting on your subscriber account to catch up so you can apply for monetization in that circumstance I would definitely take advantage of the state of promotions right now spend a few bucks stat padding and get monetized in 48 hours so you can just start making money but other than that unless you just have like a bit of cash to Splash around you want to impress your friends I think your money is probably better spent on tools equipment or education that's actually going to help you make better videos that will then naturally trigger the algorithm which is a big step towards the place where YouTube's going to start recommending your content organically so in saying all that if you want to learn how to get way more watch hours on your videos so you can hit that 4,000 hour requirement and then just buy your subscribers to monetization I've got a video on screen wholly dedicated to just teaching you how to get more watch hours on a small YouTube channel so check that out and I'll see you there
