Smart advertising: Badshah reveals how a Google tool helped him get 75mn YouTube views, beat Taylor Swift's record
Highlights
• Badshah's new video, Paagal, overtakes BTS's 'Boy With Luv' and Taylor Swift's 'Me!'
• Video becomes YouTube’s most-watched video in a 24-hour period
• Rapper's new song gets over 75 million views in one day
Imagine you’re a moderately successful Indian rapper eager to graduate to global superstardom. You’ve had a few domestic number-one hits and performed on a handful of Bollywood soundtracks, but the likes of South Korea’s BTS and Psy – other artists who don’t primarily sing in English – have something you don’t: a viral YouTube smash that breaks some sort of record. Most views in a day, for instance.
Going viral can seem a tall order, but not as tall as you’d think, given some of YouTube's peculiarities. Especially if your name is Badshah. Sony Music India declared in a press release last week that the rapper’s new video, Paagal, had overtaken BTS’s “Boy With Luv” and Taylor Swift’s “Me!” to become YouTube’s most-watched video in a 24-hour period, with 75 million views.
That’s quite some company for an artist without much of a profile outside of his home market. It prompted accusations from social media users that Badshah had somehow gamed the system. And there are weaknesses in Google's advertising setup that might have made that possible. If anyone can exploit them, this poses a conundrum to Alphabet Inc., the parent company of both Google and YouTube.
One major discrepancy with the other superstars lies in Badshah's engagement numbers. Taylor Swift and BTS have significantly more likes as a proportion of total views than Badshah does, and considerably fewer dislikes. They’re simply punching in different leagues. It suggests that people aren’t watching the videos in quite the same way.
What’s more, YouTube is yet to issue a press release confirming the viewership record, as it has in the other cases. Just last week it teamed up with Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group to announce that Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” had totted up more than a billion views.
But the biggest clue comes from Badshah himself. In response to online complaints that he deployed bots to boost views, the singer offered a more straightforward answer in an Instagram post: he used Google’s own advertising platform to promote the video, which is a puzzling mix of L.A. skylines and scantily clad dancers cutting shapes in a warehouse.
He didn’t specify which of Google’s bevy of ad products he used. But his response hints at a way that artists (and their labels) can exploit YouTube to their advantage: the public view count doesn’t differentiate between views generated by paying to be a pre-roll advertisement on other clips, or organic views that people have found by other means. The approach would circumvent the need for a bot farm repeatedly to check out the song. Google has some safety nets to make it harder for bots to tot up visits anyway.