Never buy YouTube subscribers - NEVER EVER

There are two ways to increase your subscribers, the organic way and the non-organic way.
In this article: why the organic way is good and the non organic way bad.
I will also dive into the reasons why buying YouTube subscribers will DESTROY your channel.

Non organic subscriber growth

Growing your audience the non-natural way has two MAJOR downsides:

1) It’s not allowed

There is one HUGE problem with non-organic subscriber growth: it’s not allowed in ANY way shape or form.
How hard that some “companies” (that sell related services) may shout it’s legit, it’s not!

To prove it to you, let’s take a look at the Youtube Terms Of Service under Permissions and Restrictions: “You are not allowed to”:

“access the Service using any automated means (such as robots, botnets or scrapers) except: (a) in the case of public search engines, in accordance with YouTube’s robots.txt file; (b) with YouTube’s prior written permission; or (c) as permitted by applicable law;”
and
“cause or encourage any inaccurate measurements of genuine user engagement with the Service, including by paying people or providing them with incentives to increase a video’s views, likes, or dislikes, or to increase a channel’s subscribers, or otherwise manipulate metrics;”

There is not much left to the imagination: YouTube doesn’t like it.
YouTube WILL terminate your Google account (including GMail, Search Console and ALL your YouTube channels) if you do not act according to the TOS.

YouTube has incredibly smart engineers.
If you think you can outsmart hundreds of engineers that are individually twice as smart as you, you are incredibly naive.
If your sneaky ways aren’t detected now, they will in the future, it’s just a matter of time.

2) Doesn’t increase engagement

Increasing your subscriber count is only bumping the number.
It didn’t increase the audience that watches your videos.

Think about it for two seconds…
When you release a video, notifications go out to your subscribers.
If they are interested in the video, your video gets promoted on YouTube.

If your subscribers skip your video, it will hurt further promotion.
If your most loyal fans (=subscribers) aren’t interested in your video, why should the algorithm promote it to non-fans?
Subscribers are only useful if they are interested in your content.

If you gain 10x the amount of subscribers (that are not interested in your content), your engagement rate will drop.
If your engagement rate was 5%, it’s now 0.5%.
That’s bad in the eyes of YouTube algorithms.

That applies to ALL the videos you make in the future!
Congratulations, you just dug your own YouTube-channel grave!

You are better off with your 100 interested subscribers than 1000 subscribers of which only 100 are interested and 900 uninterested.
Subscribers are worthless if they are not watching your videos.

I can assure you that every big YouTuber took the organic subscriber route, otherwise they wouldn’t even be here. 

Download gate

A download gate is a webpage that is used as a trading mechanism: you may download X if you like me on Facebook/Instagram/Soundcloud or YouTube.
It is pretty popular amongst music producers.
Because people like you on Facebook for the download, doesn’t mean they are a fan of the rest of your content.

It may work for a platform like Soundcloud, because it is not (yet) smart enough to detect non-engaging fans, but the rest of the social media definitely is.
Your percentage of engaging fans is dropping, so the algorithm thinks your content is getting worse.

The only kind of download gate that actually works is the email gate: download a free ebook (or song) if you subscribe to my mailing list, because there is no penalty for non-engagement.
Worst case scenario: subscribers might unsubscribe from your email list.

Sub-for-sub

There is a famous phenomenon on YouTube is called sub-for-sub.
People agree to follow each other’s channel, in order to bump the subscriber count for their channel.

Besides that it’s looks incredibly needy when you ask in the comments for a sub, it’s also disrespectful to the channel’s creator.
Mostly because there is a big gap in channel authority between the two channels.

The channel creator had to work hard to achieve his success the natural way.
You come barging in, try to take the shortcut.
I always delete these requests and every big YouTube creator will, because they know what the penalties are.

First, there is a huge difference in benefit (only the asker benefits).
A creator with 29 subscribers asks a creator of 30K subscribers for sub-for-sub.
Second, subscribers need to be interested in the content of the asker.

Asking for sub-for-sub (in comments, description or elsewhere) is officially considered spam by YouTube and will treat it as such.
The penalty is pretty severe: repeat offenders will face Google account termination.

If you want to leverage the power of a big channel, make sure that you add value to the video in the form of a comment (without asking anything in return).
If you add value over and over again, the big YouTuber starts to notice you and maybe will do a shout out or will mention you.
Then (and only then) you can take advantage of their big following.

Another way to leverage the power of a bigger channel, is to do a collaboration.
Remember that both parties have to gain something with the collaboration.

Buying YouTube subscribers

The most famous non organic subscriber phenomenon is literally buying subscribers.
You pay a shady company hundreds of dollars and they will bump your subscriber number.

Before writing the article, I did some research.
I have to say that the arguments on their websites are convincing:

24H customer support
Legit traffic / organic traffic (but remarkably fail to mention how much)
Real users
You will not be banned
Subscriber drop replacement (so they know that YouTube will delete subscribers)
No bots
Worldwide geo target
quality
curated marketplace
our services are within YouTube’s TOS
social proof, which magically will attract other subs

Judging by the arguments, they know that you doubt if it’s legit.
Strangely enough they never offer money-back guarantees.

The prices they ask are between $40, $100 to $150 per 1000 subs.
Even if they speak the truth about watch time by real humans, if I do the math, something doesn’t add up.

Let’s say they offer one hour of real YouTube video consumption for 1000 subs.
Let’s say that the minimum wage in America and Europe is $8 an hour.
How can you deliver 1000 hours (1000 subs x1 hour) of watch time worth $8000 (€8 x 1000 hours) for only $40?

The wages is Asia and Africa may be extremely low compared to the west and their employees may be watching via a VPN.
But the companies themselves have to provide infrastructure and they have to make a profit themselves in order to keep the company alive.

I can only draw one conclusion which makes the prices plausible.
If they indeed deliver (which is questionable in itself), they have use bots (which is against YouTube TOS) to earn money.
Bots (short for robots) are computer algorithms that pose themselves as humans.
Bots use YouTube ghost accounts (mostly hacked accounts from real humans).
Bots could technically watch your videos, but I doubt they will.

Once in a while YouTube does a sweep of bot accounts.
If this happens you will lose your subscribers just as fast as you bought them.

There is another downside, which I haven’t made abundantly clear yet.
If those companies offer subscribers, they don’t offer engagement.
Less engagement ratio means a worse reputation in the YouTube algorithm.

If they indeed offer engagement (as some claim), you need to keep paying them on a monthly basis in order to keep the engagement going.

Organic subscriber growth

if you are willing to spend money on your YouTube growth, consider one of the legitimate ways.

Keep making videos

It’s too obvious, right?

Some quick tips on how to increase the amount of subscribers:
Ask viewers to subscribe at the beginning of your video (right after the bumper for example) and at the end of the video.
Add a “subscribe” image as channel watermark
Add a subscribe tile to the end screen of your videos
Add an animation to the video in which you ask to subscribe. It’s a non intrusive way to ask for a sub.

Advertise

According to the YouTube Terms of Service, you are allowed to advertise to promote your channel.
You can run ads on other social media like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube itself.

But the same rule applies: viewers need to like your content.
Running ads is risky because of that reason.
If you do decide to run an ad, use a regular video that you normally would release on your YouTube channel.

This “ad” represents your content the best.
So if people decide to subscribe, they subscribe because they like your video (and not the fancy promotion that sells your channel).

Hiring expertise

The best way (if I may say so) is to hire an experienced youtube creator.
A real professional will ALWAYS tell you to grow you subscribers the organic way.
But instead of taking the shortcut, you optimize organic subscriber growth.

I like to advice you about growing your YouTube channel, I love to help you.
You can find more info here: https://www.socialvideoplaza.com/en/youtube-coaching
When you are serious about YouTube and want to take it to the next level, take a look at my video training program: Viral Strategy.
The program takes you step-by-step through the process of getting views, subscribers and going viral.

For new creators I included a module that guides you step-by-step through the process of starting, creating and setting up a YouTube channel.