A lot of genuinely interesting things have been happening on YouTube lately: singers racking up millions of views, ordinary people posting amateur videos and going viral, real money changing hands and no shortage of shady dealings between producers and the artists they work with.
That pulled me into looking at what view counts and clicks on YouTube actually mean. I’d already tested this once in an earlier post about “cover” videos and their stats, but this time I landed on a much more interesting channel: a child performer named Pellumb Hajdari. We don’t have children in the family, so I hadn’t paid much attention to child performers since Adelina Berisha and Adea Pula, but this kid’s numbers say something about how thoroughly YouTube has replaced TV in our homes:
6,063 subscribers. 22,107,855 views across all videos. Joined September 17, 2011. Of those 22 million views, one video alone accounts for 9,999,265, uploaded July 11, 2011, rights held by OnAir Music.
The subscriber count matters here too, 6,062 people who signed up specifically to watch this channel’s videos, shared 960 times across social media. What’s notable is that among the 635 comments, a large share are negative, accusing the channel of buying views the way BabaStars was accused of doing. Whatever the truth of that, I found a calculator that puts potential earnings from a channel like this somewhere between $25 and $299 a day, up to roughly $83,000 a year at the high end. (These figures aren’t official, not confirmed by anyone responsible for the channel, just a rough estimate.)
Which means this one small, likeable kid may be earning something like 15 times the average salary for an adult worker here, where the average wage is around 500 euros a month.
What I actually want to know: are Albanians buying fake views just to look good? If so, worth remembering that YouTube’s 301+ counter exists specifically to catch that. And if these earnings are real, is anyone actually paying taxes on them in Kosovo? In the end, I didn’t know we had this kind of small-scale wealth being generated right here rather than abroad, but if we do, I suppose it’s a positive sign for how much foreign currency is finding its way into Kosovo.
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