Like many people, I use videos in some of my posts and those videos are almost always on YouTube. For me, I use the video to compliment the post and help show things that just can’t be shown in photos or described in text. But I also want those videos to be discovered independent of the blog post and bring people to my site. I’m sure almost everyone posting videos on YouTube would love their video to go viral, but that’s no easy task. Recently, I was asked to review some software to help with this task.

I was given a link a website about how to get views on youtube, where I could get YouTube Jump Start, software that promises to get you tons of “quality views” to your YouTube video without doing anything that could put your YouTube account at risk of deletion. Here I am a few weeks later, and I have some real numbers from a real video I submitted (mostly) just to test this out.

About YouTube Jump Start

As mentioned above, it’s designed to boost your YouTube video views, but how does it work and how much is it? The details about exactly how these views make their way to your video aren’t really clear, but the sales page promises “no bots” and “no proxies”, so we’re left to assume these views are all real people seeing your video. Today, I confirmed that these are, in fact, “real people”.

The program includes a couple different packages, depending on how many videos you want to promote, from $70 and $15/month (4 videos a day) to $100 one-time for 25 videos ($4/video). The upside is that this is for 200+ views per video, per day, “forever”.

When you fire up the program, you just pop in a video URL and it submits. It was a lot easier than I ever anticipated. It might have been a little too simple for my liking, actually, but as long as it does what I want it to, that’s fine.

Tons Of New YouTube Views

I’ve been on the web a long time and I’ve seen a lot of programs, scripts, and sites that offer to generate non-organic traffic for you. Organic traffic is the stuff that just happens when you have good content and people feel compelled to tell other people about it. This traffic is the stuff you have to help yourself get. There’s no shame in going after more traffic. In fact, you SHOULD be doing this if you’re serious about people seeing your content. In any case, I’ve seen a lot of promises to deliver traffic and a lot that have failed to deliver. This was not the case here.

For the first week (maybe a little less), I let my video ride on organic traffic and a couple tweets I sent out and it did pretty well on its own. As the initial views slowed down, I decided to kick in the Jump Start program, represented largely by the brown in the graph above. As you can see, it started delivering right away. Not too bad. It actually shows a couple points where it almost doubled my organic peak. That brown part of the graph is truly traffic YouTube can’t identify the origin of, so it’s not ALL from this program, but I think it’s a safe guess to say that about 95% or more is.

The graph above shows that the viewers seem to come from all age groups, and I also looked at the geographic location graphs, which seem to indicate mostly United states traffic, and that’s important to me. After a few weeks, YouTube Jump Start delivered about 4,000 to 4,500 views to my video.

Is This Valuable Traffic?

That’s debatable, really. First off, let’s think about what good non-organic traffic is. They sum up what I was thinking almost word for word:

If you have more views, your video will not only show up on earlier search pages, but will be recommended to others via YouTube’s related videos function. Your video may even be featured on YouTube’s Global Homepage! (if its worthy enough).

This, of course, is why I did my test. My video, as indicated in the first graph, did pretty well on its own, so it’s safe to assume that the video didn’t totally suck. Sadly, out of 5,000+ views, only 456 were “related content” views and 114 were from YouTube search. 261 and 69 (respectively) of these were from before I ran the program. What this says to me is that although I saw a ton of views to my video, I haven’t realized the benefit of the software in the ways I had hoped. Ideally, The software would get tons of people viewing my video and those people would share and rate at least a little. This doesn’t seem to have happened much, if at all. As for it boosting organic traffic within YouTube (related videos and search), I think almost all 250 or so organic views were as a result of the added traffic Jump Start gave the video. This isn’t what I’d hoped for, but it’s a lot more than I’d have without the software.

Conclusions

Everything really boils down to this question: Is the return on investment good enough? If you produce videos that are good enough and just need some help, this could work, but I don’t know if it will really generate the organic traffic that is most critical to success on the web. Ultimately, the best plan is to create killer content regularly for the best organic traffic, but this could give you a good, well, jump start.