Hear us out: With only 100 dollars you can get more than 10 thousand views on YouTube, 10 thousand likes or some other mind blowing engagement.
But, is it only the price? Why people do it? The market habit of buying and selling interactions on social networks has had a significant exploit in conjunction with the success of influencer marketing and, also, the importance of social proof and status in our society.
And even before the possibility of closing lucrative collaborations with brands, being famous on the net was a temptation, to the point that so many people were willing to spend (real) money for a handful of extra (sometimes fake) likes on their posts, videos or whatever social media piece of content they are using.
And even those who don’t intend to leverage more followers, more subs or more views to increase their bargaining power with brands to land some paid partnership, however, may want to exploit the buying and selling of social interactions.
And, today the reasons are more than ever! It could be to create buzz around one’s own idea. It could be to make one’s own content go viral: for many successful youtubers, for example, it is important that a new video immediately gathers a good number of views, because in this way you can exploit those mechanisms of imitation that push users to want to watch a video that already has millions of views and ignore another, perhaps on the same topic, which still has a few dozen views. This, also called as social proof.
But we are not done. We than have social status, which is coming day by day a more important thing in our society. Meaning that the social status is part of our persona and its value and certainly, one easy way to help increase one’s social status or to measure it, it is social media’s. Hence, why some people buy thousands of followers or produce music videos which than get boosted to reach popularity. Yes, popularity is the key word related to social status.
And, to finish, another reason could be the simplest one, but still one more reason. Buying engagement just for pleasure, to see your own piece of content receive traffic, engagement, appreciation.
Really, the reason why people decide to buy engagement or YouTube views are infinite and, can you even blame them? If we all had infinite money, there’s no doubt that, all of us, would spend it to bring some extra traffic to our videos!