Social media firm sells YouTube viewers
By Stewart Mitchell
Posted on 5 Nov 2009 at 09:05
Social-media marketing firm uSocial says it has started selling airtime on YouTube in a bid to improve rankings for its customers.
uSocial.net – the company which angered social networks by selling Facebook fans and Twitter followers - claims it can capitalise on the YouTube video marketing boom by fixing page rankings and manipulating viewing figures.
“We’re always looking at expanding our operations in the social-marketing world and YouTube was the obvious next step,” says uSocial CEO Leon Hill. “Video marketing is an extremely powerful medium and one that many want to conquer.”
The company claims most companies trying to increase viewer figures organically struggle to attract more than several dozen views, but can improve audiences by buying viewers, starting at $127 (£77) for 5,000 views.
“Using several of our methods, we can get a totally unknown video in front of the eyes of potentially millions of people,” claims Hill.
On its website, uSocial claims claims customers can buy “YouTube views which are not only all real people watching your videos, but can even be targeted by interest group. Your videos will show up higher in search results, meaning you'll gain even more natural search traffic.”
Google, owner of YouTube, has yet to respond to uSocial's announcement.
From around the web
Google's voting method
Google has already infrastructure in place preventing over-voting of video clips. If the given clip gets statistically more votes per view than the average video, then the voter gets a ban.
The solution is to keep number of votes in proportion to number of views. Interestingly, giving negative votes on all video clips will not result in ban.
By stasi47 on 5 Nov 2009 
We used uSocial.net
Hi there,
A bit of feedback from a 'user' of usocial.net.
We are a British company that used usocial.net to buy 1000 ‘fans’ for a newly created Facebook page (I Love Skiing)
for around ~£120, more out of curiosity than anything. Due to the nature of the Facebook page I wasn't concerned about being duplicitous, after all, I didn't expect anyone to be coerced into joining a fansite that they were disinterested in.
The campaign was superficially successful, with a large influx of fans joining. However, despite telling usocial.net that we are UK based and wished to have UK based fans (which they ask for), the fans we gained were all American. So while we gained pure numbers, we diminished our relevance and simply wish we hadn’t bothered.
I hope this helps.
Tim
Skiing Holidays Ltd
By SkiingHolidays on 20 Nov 2009
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