USocial begins selling YouTube video views

USocial claims it can put an unknown YouTube video in front of millions of people

Australian firm uSocial has launched a service designed to give YouTube users and marketers access to a large number of clicks on their videos.

The firm is selling 'views' on YouTube videos with two options, targeted and not targeted, and in a range of categories. Viewers are real people, according to uSocial.

"Starting in packages of 5,000 views to be delivered over around a week, we'll begin delivering you quality targeted viewership from real traffic sources around the web, and from within YouTube itself," uSocial said in a statement.

"Not only will this deliver you instant, quality traffic to your videos, as well as the web site you're promoting, but you're also going to be showing up better in YouTube searches as time goes on.

"All targeted YouTube views we deliver are real people and not some kind of fake bot or script traffic, so there is no risk in having your account banned by YouTube. And that's our guarantee."

USocial also sells votes on Digg, and recently caused controversy by selling Facebook friends and Twitter followers. The company said that it sees YouTube as an obvious extension of its services.

"We are always looking at expanding our operations in the social marketing world and YouTube was the obvious next step," said uSocial chief executive Leon Hill.

"Using several of our methods, we can get a totally unknown video in front of the eyes of potentially millions of people which can mean megabucks to anyone who's in business."

V3.co.uk asked YouTube parent Google to comment on the announcement, but has not received a response.

However, Google did explain that searches are "based on relevance to a particular query and cannot be influenced by third parties, beyond producing good content and ensuring it is labelled or tagged correctly".