This guy has 650k video views. But hardly anyone has seen this video.
You don’t have to watch more than 15 seconds of this video to know it’s horrible:
The sound and video quality is terrible, the subject matter is boring, the guy is a bad speaker…and yet somehow he’s had more than 650k views in less than 2 weeks.
But he says he’s a ‘social media expert’, so maybe he’s got this worldwide following or a book or a website or something, and you just didn’t know about him yet, right? Wrong. He doesn’t even appear to have a website – there isn’t one listed on his YouTube profile, and my very best Googling has failed to turn up anything about this guy. I can’t even find him on Twitter, though to be fair there seem to be about 150 ‘Daniel Cohens’ there, and some don’t have pictures or profiles.
What he’s got is some kind of hackery that YouTube hasn’t figured out yet, and here’s how I know: When you click the ‘insights’ button on the YouTube page for this video (it’s the little bar graph box to the right of the view count), it says:
- 99.9% of the views happened on the first day the video was posted
- All of them came from a mobile device
- The demographics were exclusively ‘male, 35-44 years old’
All of this points to some kind of technical trickery that allowed him to artificially inflate his views. I do know that videos which are genuinely popular – like this Shaytards video – show a much more varied view source, demographics and timeline.
(NOTE: As I write this, I see that Daniel Cohen has now turned off the ability to see the insights on his videos. But almost all of his other 37 videos have fewer than 100 views, which tells me that he hasn’t got any kind of ‘following’ or loyal audience.)
Big numbers doesn’t mean anyone is actually paying attention
As far as I’m concerned, the minute someone tells you they’re a social media ‘expert’, ‘guru’, ‘ninja’ or ‘visionary’ because they’ve got big numbers, you should run the other way, for 2 reasons:
- Anyone who really knows anything about social media knows that the landscape is changing every minute, so being a ‘guru’ is next to impossible
- Getting a whole lot of followers, friends, views or ‘pins’ isn’t the point of social media. It’s what you do with those followers, friends, views and pins.
Daniel Cohen may have 650k ‘views’ of his video, but if they’ve all been generated by his army of minions in a room in Bulgaria, no real people are actually seeing the thing. He’s not selling anything, he’s not driving traffic to a website which is selling anything, he’s not increasing his influence or opportunities for paid speaking engagements or media coverage – which means he can’t sell anything for you, either.