This blank, silent YouTube video got 100,000 views
Minneapolis-based agency Solve created a four-minute blank video without sound and ran it as a pre-roll ad on YouTube for about two weeks to find out how many views it would get.
The video ended up garnering over 100,000 views and according to the agency, 22 per cent of viewers actually watched it until the end.
Called ‘The Blank Video Project,’ the agency said it conducted the experiment to show that views aren’t always a reliable metric, even though marketers often measure a video’s success by how many people have watched it.
Neil James, digital strategist at Solve, told The Drum: “One of the scenarios that we encounter often in our industry is that clients, peers, and many people will use the count that is associated with a YouTube video as a proxy for its creative merit.”
Solve was charged if a viewer watched the video for at least 30 seconds. For those 100,000 viewers who actually made it past the 30-second mark, the agency invested $1,400, only 1.4 cents per view.
James said it’s more important to look at how viewers are engaging with the content, whether they’re clicking the ‘thumbs up’ sign on YouTube or sharing it on social media.
“Some videos have tens of thousands of views and less than ten ‘thumbs up.’ So it’s very obvious that the view count is artificial,” he said.
While the agency is unsure why exactly the video got as many views as it did, James said it could be attributed to people having multiple tabs open and not realizing that the video was playing at all. He also said it could have been non-human traffic such as robots or people might have thought that something was loading.