This just caused some drama in the board game space. One well-respected YouTuber cut ties to another content creator with whom he had shared a channel, accusing the other guy of unethical advertising practices. Basically the unethical scheme works like this: YouTube channel owner pays YouTube to get more views for his videos; at the same time he charges advertisers per view, making more money than he paid to YouTube. Channel owner makes more money, advertisers pays for thousands of viewers that aren't organic, and that often stop viewing before even seeing the advertised product. The world unethical is used because the practice is neither illegal, nor prohibited by YouTube itself, who also make money that way.

Why do that for a board game channel? Because the organic number of viewers and subscribers for board game channels is small. Board game publishers are mostly small, board games are often printed in only a few thousand copies. Influencer advertising for board games works generally well, because in such a small niche, there are only a few places where a significant concentration of possible customers exist. But the effect of paying YouTube for more viewers depends on the size of YouTube, not on the size of the niche. These viewers just clicked on a thumbnail YouTube proposed to them on their first page, and then quickly realize that the video is about a subject they aren't interested in. But as shown in this example, this got the view numbers up from around 2k to 36k. If you can pretend to advertisers that your channel is over one order of magnitude bigger than it is really, you make an order of magnitude more money.

For me this is just another example of a long and ongoing trend: There are a million ways to boost "viewership". I even still get mail regularly from people who offer SEO (search engine optimization) for my blog, which was one of the earlier methods to boost "eyeballs". Algorithms send people this way or that, so the people who make money from viewers learn to reverse engineer the algorithms and optimize their content for maximum algorithmic impact. But you can also simply pay some bot farm to send thousands of fake viewers your way. And if you are okay with your viewers not actually being interested in your content, you can also create that content quickly these days with generative AI, which is even better than humans for algorithmic optimization. We aren't quite at the dead internet theory level yet, but yes, there is content out there that is not created by humans, and where a large portion of the viewers either isn't human, or is human, but isn't engaged with the content at all. And the bots and "algorithmic viewers" won't be buying the advertised good.

An AI video watched by bots doesn't appear to make economic sense, until you realize that an advertiser who wasn't careful is probably paying for those fake views of the fake content. The global internet advertising market is estimated to have a size of several hundred billions of dollars, and some of it is spent unwisely, or the advertiser is being scammed. The obvious problem of that is that it isn't sustainable. It just takes one economic downturn for advertisers to be forced to look more closely at the efficacy of their advertising spending, or they get wiser over time. For influencer advertising to work, you need actual humans to be engaged with the content. AI slop on the content side, and bots and algorithmic "fake" viewers on the view side, diminish the effect of advertising, which diminishes its economic value. In a new form of Gresham's Law, bad advertising could actually drive out good advertising, because advertisers simply lower what they pay per view, and channels with just organic viewers suffer more from that than channels with fake viewers.

In a perfect world, advertisers find a way to better determine how effectively their advertising dollars are spent, and AI slop and fake viewers stop getting paid, and then disappear. Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world. There is both the risk of the wrong people getting paid, and the risk of people who make good content not getting paid enough to continue doing so. On an internet without advertising money, you'd only get content creators like me, producing a rather low amount of content with low production value, because most people won't do more than that without getting paid. Advertising money created the modern internet as we know it. The people who are trying to abuse the system with get rich quick schemes are a danger to that.