How I pushed the cost per view under 1 cent

It all started when I wanted to grow the watch time on one of my YouTube channels. I wasn’t so much concerned about the view count as I was about the watch time at first. The goal was just to boost the watch time on my channel. So I made my first YouTube video ad.

Minimizing the CPV

At first, I was okay with paying 2-3 cents per view. But as I was digging deeper into the video ads and online advertising I realized that I could push the cost per view even lower. As my goal now was to get views and grow the watch time I didn’t care that much about the location of the viewer. So I was going for the cheaper countries.

Cheap countries don’t always give you low CPV

I found out that targeting commonly known cheap locations don’t always give you more views and greater numbers. There is a simple reason for that. And the most useful lesson that I learned was through making a mistake. The mistake was assuming that India as a target location would result in low CPV. For me, the opposite happened. I was paying more per view in India than in Western countries.

The reason is smartphones and mobile internet

As I wanted my ads to run as long as possible I got better results targeting Western countries. I realized it only after I saw that, in my case, ads running on mobile are more expensive than those on a tablet, desktop, and TV. As people in less developed countries tend to use more mobile and smartphones than a tablet, PC or smart TV you get more ads shows on mobile devices.

For example, compare the ways of how a person uses YouTube on mobile versus TV. Watching YouTube on TV is much more passive thus skipping an ad on TV is much less likely to happen. And that’s why you get more views and longer watch time.

I dropped ads on mobile

The next logical step that I took was to drop my ads on mobile. The result was just breathtaking. I got 4 times as much watch time and twice as many views for the same money as letting my ads run on mobile.

 

Last update: 2019-01-04 (Y,M,D)

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