Old Movies

This is my most viewed video. It’s amazing. I won’t pretend that I don’t love it–the greed, the panting, the epic drama of secret audio recordings.

It’s been floating around the internet for eight years now, but it’s not allowed on YouTube. My heartbreaking work of staggering genius has been taken down from the big social media sites an absolutely uncomical amount of times.

People swarmed to watch this thing the first few days after the release of its first few iterations, but corporate censorship cut off any hopes of sustained momentum–as with most stories here.

If the original YouTube version of this video had remained available, I suspect that it would have garnered more than 100,000 legit views by now. Things in Internet Marketing might have changed (slightly) more than they did.

The video is a rare, remarkable, glimpse into the inner workings of a cartel of internet conmen. If you’re interested in this story you can read all about it under The Syndicate tag. But for now, as we are currently exploring the theme of internet advertising’s ineffectiveness/uselessness, I’ll just note that during their conversation Andy and Jeff agree that if 750 people were willing to buy Andy’s get rich quick product–after it was incessantly advertised for weeks to a captive audience of one million people–then that would be a huge success.

The great gurus of manipulative internet advertising aim for a 0.075% conversion rate.

750 / 1,000,000

Scaled internet fraud is achieved with a bludgeon not a blade.

Most of my early YouTube work has been taken down, with two of my accounts banned and deleted. Above is the most popular video on my current YouTube account. It has 304,000 views. Impressive, but 98% of those views are 100% fake.

The story behind these fake views is strange and yet still somehow so super boring.

1. Some bros, who I’d never written about, and never really planned to write about, were nevertheless quite upset about my anti-unicornian naysaying.

2. They put significant effort into creating a series of defamatory/parody videos about me.

3. Not many people viewed those videos.

4. So the bros purchased video views. I guess for SEO purposes? Or was it so I’d think the hate about me was more popular than the actual me? I don’t know, but also, I don’t care.

5. I teased them about buying views somewhere in the comments of this site.

6. In response, they purchased fake views for one of my Herbalife videos. Maybe to accuse me of being a hypocrite? Or, maybe it was to do this?

Again, don’t know… don’t care.

My Herbalife stories have never been popular. I don’t have the attention of the MLM subculture, and I don’t have the attention of the Herbalife victim pool. My literary voice (perhaps a slightly self-aggrandizing way to describe my l33t speak gibberish) was intended for an audience deeply immersed in internet culture and never traveled well to other lands.

This “Is Herbalife a Scam?” video would not have, on its own, received more than 1500 views over five years. Yet in the years after these 295,000 fake views were purchased, the video has been viewed almost 10,000 additional times–making it one of my most popular videos.

The easily contrived illusion that the video was popular, made it popular.

The story of these two videos is the true story of the advertising funded internet: Truth is driven out, fake is driven up.