we check our own numbers, and publish it when they are wrong
Rival advertisers are supposed to hire different kinds of creator. We checked 2,725 of them, then dealt the same creators back out at random. Between 65% and 93% of the difference between advertisers turned out to be luck.
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YouTube gives creators a checkbox that says 'this video contains paid promotion'. Across 227,632 sponsored videos, we counted how often it is used. For commission deals: less than one time in twelve.
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Half of real paid creator relationships never happen again. We counted 108,433 of them — and found that the bigger the creator, the only slightly better the odds.
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Almost everyone uses views-per-subscriber to spot a bought audience. We checked it against 1,310 channels YouTube actually cleaned up. It does worse than guessing — and there is a simple reason why.
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Six popular ways to spot a fake audience, put through the same test. Three point the wrong way, one has quietly stopped working, and one is genuinely good.
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Brands pay a premium for small creators because their audiences supposedly react more. Across 143,000 channels, mostly they do not — and the exceptions depend entirely on the subject.
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