Artistes told there is no benefit to buying views

With speculation rife that some entertainers may be 'buying' YouTube views, Donavon Watkis, who analyses the statistics on the social media platform, said such practices will  not benefit artistes.

“YouTube won’t pay them for those views and you can’t make it to my chart if you buy views because YouTube won’t calculate the views that you bought,” Watkis said.

Watkis is the creator and host of the World Music Views, aired during Entertainment Report on TVJ.

He said that the algorithm that he uses allows him to see even the parishes where persons in Jamaica are watching entertainment videos.

Watkis said that the views to comment ratio is also one way to determine whether the views are being bought.

“If somebody has millions of views and five comments, you know that they probably bought those views,” Watkis reasoned.

Although, he contends that some artistes buy YouTube views because they want to make the headlines, but he says YouTube does not count f bot-driven YouTube views.

“An artiste would probably look good if him say him get a million views in a week, so his aim is try to push up some artificial thing to make headline but that does not benefit him because he will not know where his fans are,” he said.

He said that one way that Jamaican artistes can gain traction to their videos is to pay for adverts on YouTube.

"If you view a dancehall song, the next suggested video will be that artiste, you can actually purchase that from YouTube so that whenever somebody types in ‘Jamaica’, somebody types in, ‘reggae’ or whatever name you optimise on Google, your song will be among those selected when somebody searches for it," he said.

He noted that artistes can use insight from the authentic views that their videos receive to tailor their sets to certain audiences.
“There is a way that things connect culturally by creating content, going for the people who love you first and forget the rest until they catch on,” he said.