As someone who's been on YouTube for 20 years, it's pretty sad to realize just how many videos had fake traction once I learned about this. So many videos I used to study as reference - thinking they were good benchmarks to beat, but turns out they were not real 😕Did you know?
Google itself is selling fake YouTube likes. I was able to "buy" 5000 likes for ~$70 with Google Ads on the below video even though it has nothing but a black screen. It even has a >90% like/dislike ratio and >15% like-to-view ratio to appear organic.