 Hey everybody what's going on it's your man Kory, welcome to The Digital Dash where I'll be giving you guys tips on how to market your songs and get those numbers booming now. If you're new to the channel, I'm a digital marketer, I specialize in helping artists like yourself get their songs heard through platforms like Spotify, like Instagram, like YouTube and a bunch of others. Now what I want to talk with you guys about today is how much money does it take to get a million views on a video. This video was pretty much inspired by a DM I got that literally asked, hey Kory, how much money would it take me to hit a million views? And full disclaimer, there is no one cookie cutter answer. Some people hit this goal through different ways, through different price variations depending on the strategy, the content, it's so many things that go into it. But thanks to things like Facebook ads and Google ads and just pay advertising in whole, you can kind of get an estimate on what that number would look like for you. This video has a chance to show you guys some case studies from Google ads that I've ran, some things that have happened with some of my friends, and just some general things that I've noticed so we can finally answer that question together. How much money will it take for you to hit a million views on your video? Now before we get into all of that, come follow me on Instagram, I make sure to put my ad name on the screen, come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas, all of that good stuff. Now with that being said, let's get right into it. All right guys, so here we are inside of my Google ads manager account. Now I'm not going to lie to you, this video is pretty much a Google ads case study video. I'm going to touch on a couple of other things that I have seen from people I know and just things I've seen on the internet. But as far as hitting the million view mark, this video is going to mainly be focused around pay advertising, specifically Google and YouTube ads. And the way that I got to this video I did was someone deemed me and asked me the question of how much money would it take for them to get two a million views. And normally that's not a question that can be answered. Like there's so many variables that go into that that you just can't even really define. Most of the times you just have to put the video out there, do your best for marketing and then see where it goes. But however, thanks to pay advertising, more specifically Google ads and YouTube ads, you can at least get a rough estimate of how much money you would have to spend through that alone to get two a million views. So for this video, I ran a test ad for my friend Flower Child. Flower Child is a Neo Soul R&B producer that's based here in Atlanta. He's actually managed by the guy that does my onscreen animation. So, you know, we had to keep this all in the family. Now, like I said, for the sake of this video, I spent a very small amount of money just to get an idea of how much money Flower Child would need to spend if he wanted to hit a million views through pay advertising for his field of breeze video. And if you want to check that out, shame this plug, it is field of breeze feature and not a breeze. And this has nothing to do with the topic of the video. But if you're someone who is looking to do pay advertising for their video, please, please, please make sure that it's compliant with the policies of the ad platform. Look those up. It's mostly like no nudity, no violence, no guns, no drugs, no alcohol, none of that crazy stuff. Please make sure that you're compliant because if you're not, you're literally throwing away the easiest access to hundreds of thousands and millions of people just by having like a blend in your video, something that's crazy. But back to the video idea. So for this, I spent a little over $75, so $75 and 8 cents. And as you can see, the ad did really well. He got a view rate of all of most 60%, 17,000 views and 28,000 impressions out of this ad. Now, that's good for so many different reasons. But the main reason being that there's not really much else that you can do that will get you even close to these results for this amount of money. Like, there's not too many things I could think of where $75 might even get you even a fraction of this amount of views. So where we will start to see how much money Flower Child will need to spend to get a million views on his video is we will first need to calculate his CPV, which is his cost per view. And the way that you do that is you want to divide the amount of money spent by the amount of views that you got. So $75 and 8 cents divided by 17,139 views. So that gives us a CPV of .00438. So that's a little less than half a penny per view, which like I said is really good. And for this, I did a couple of targeting tricks that I use. If you would like to learn more about those, I recommend you guys go and check out the paid advertising courses that we have on the Brain Man Network. I made sure to leave the links to that in the description below. But like I said, .00438 is the cost per view of this ad for Flower Child, which is crazy, it's insane. The next step that we will need to do to get the amount of views or the cost for a million views for this will be to just simply multiply that number by a million. So .00438 times a million gives us a grand total of $4,380.65. So Flower Child, we need to spend a little over $4,300 in order to hit a million views through this YouTube ad alone. Now, that sounds like a lot. I know it does. But one, if you break that down into months, it's not that crazy. Secondly, there are so many other things that you could spend that money on, whether it be channel placements, influencers, so many things that you could put that money into that wouldn't even give you a fraction of that amount of views. And there's also another thing that we want to consider in this that we haven't considered in this is organic traffic. Organic traffic could end up making this cheaper, meaning that if we're running the ad to the right people, to people who are actively engaged, who really like the song in the video, that cost starts to become a lot lower because they're sharing it to their friends, they're listening to it five, 10, 20 times a day. They're reposting it to their social channels. All of these things that you guys want to do or want your new fans to do and all of the goals or all of the things that are goals of pay advertising. Pay advertising is just a means to jump starting that organic traffic and getting it out there. Meaning that if we kept this going long enough, he could hit a million views for $1,500, $2,500. Who knows, depending on where the organic traffic carries him and that takes him. And like I said, $4,000 or $2,500 to $4,000 for a million views, considering what you would get out of that situation is actually pretty good. It's really good. Now, another example that I want to give you guys is based on another friend of mine. It's an artist by the name of Tony Melman. He's another artist who's based here in Atlanta. And for a video that he dropped in January, he only spent a few hundred dollars to promote this video and it's almost about to crack 600K. At the time of making this video, you can see it's at 588,000. Now, if I remember correctly from our conversation, I think he said he spent about five to $600 on an influencer campaign. So he paid a couple of influencers to shout the video out and do some reposts. And what happened in his situation is it triggered the YouTube algorithm and it carried the video out and got him to where it is. So where I think he probably hit about 20 to 30,000 views naturally just out of the strength of his fan base. And then once YouTube picked it up, it was out of here. And I know it's not at a million views yet, but I honestly think just from some back-end analytics things, I've seen that this video would hit a million views by the end of the year. Meaning that he would pretty much have gotten a million views for $600, $700. Probably much it cost him to do the whole campaign. Which once again, extremely different from the $4,000 that will have to be spent for a flower child. But this is also a rare case, or it's not really a rare case, but it's one of those things that you can't always plan for. The thing with flower child's video is that it's measurable, it's able to be calculated and budgeted for. With this, you're kind of seeing if the platform will pretty much rock with you and push you out. If it doesn't, then he would still have had to went back to the drawing board and keep pushing it. He's spending money on certain things to get it going. But like I said, the algorithm really worked out in his favor and carried him out there. So, two extremely different examples. Two methods that can work to get you two a million views. Honestly, I recommend you do both when you can afford to do both. Pay advertising and influencer marketing with the right influencers when you can. But if you're trying to go for a more measurable way to get to a million views, then you'll definitely want to stick with Google ads, YouTube ads, all that stuff. Now, another example that I want you guys to take a look at is a video, Basha Pagal, which is created by this Indian rapper who is signed to Sony Music. Now, this video pretty much made headlines because he got something crazy, like 75 million views in a day, which knowing what I know, he more than likely put a lot of that into YouTube ads and put a lot of that probably into Facebook marketing as well. I know Adam 22 from No Jumper did a video about it and I think the guy leaned or Sony leaned a lot heavier into Google advertisement or YouTube ads for that. Now, what's interesting about this situation is that one, since he is a rapper based in India, I'm willing to bet he targeted majority of his advertising to India. Now, if you have ran ads before, then you know that India is one of the cheapest places that you can target with your ads. It's crazy. Like, you will more than likely always get less than a penny per view when targeting India. There are cases when you shouldn't target India, depending on what you're doing, I don't always recommend targeting it, but it is a cheap place to target for these ads. So, Basha for that 75 million, if we had to just assume that all that came from paid advertising, that means he probably spent somewhere, I would say, if Flower Child got 0.004 cents per view, I would guess that Basha probably got around 0.002, maybe even 0.00, let's just use Flower Child's number for this example. Let's say that he was at the same mark, 0.004. So, we would need to take that 75 million and multiply it by 0.004. So, that means that Basha spent around $300,000 to hit that 75 million, or 300,000 max because once again, we have to assume that organic traffic played a part into this. Once the story got picked up, I'm sure the organic traffic exploded, thanks to all the press and all the videos that were being done about this, but it's still one of those things that you guys can use as a case study. You can use as a measurable outlet to why you should be considering using YouTube ads for your music videos, as long as they comply to the terms of the platform and comply to the ad policy. So, like I said, this video is pretty much a Google ads case study video, I want you guys to check it out. If you really want to know how much money it will cost you specifically to get to a million views, or if you want a ballpark number, come on here, run some YouTube ads, get your number down, and then consider other things that you're doing for promotion, like influencer marketing, like Tom DeMille may have done, like page promotions, or any on the ground promotions that you're doing. Tie it with the number that you get from estimating your cost per view, running these Google ads, and then use that as an estimate of how much you would need to spend in order to hit your million view mark just through straight paid marketing alone. So there we have it guys, and pretty much what I want you to take away from that is that thanks to things like Facebook ads and Google ads and paid advertising, you are now able to come away with a rough estimate of a number on what it would take for you to hit a million views on your video. But what I also want you to think about is that if the video is good, if the people like it and that sharing it, you will start to see a decrease in that number as some of those viewers become repeat viewers, as some of those viewers start to put their friends onto your video, pretty much bringing you free traffic that decreases the cost that it would take for you to get to a million views. Now that's pretty much the only way to really get a number like a real solid defined number. And other than that, you're pretty much hoping that the organic traffic happens on a much smaller number, which it does happen sometimes. But like I said, this at least gives you a number to shoot for to work towards until that viralness or just that mass spreading of your content does happen. And for those of you out there who are already running pay ads on your videos, what does your number look like? What is it looking like? It would take for you to get a million views, drop the number in the comment section below just to let people know that you are doing it and it does work and you are seeing what the number looks like. Outside of that, if you feel like you're learning anything today, please like and share this video, hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Corey and I'll see y'all next time.