You may or may not know that Australia is having an election in a couple of weeks.
There is a particular political party which is running a lot of ads. LOTS of ads. In fact, right now, whenever I go to YouTube, there’s a big link at the top saying “Watch <political party’s> Ad”
I am unlikely to vote for this political party
</understatement>
If I click this repeatedly with the sound turned off, how much are they likely to have to pay YouTube? Does this even work, or do advertisers only pay for new eyeballs?
I believe youtube charges between $0.10 and $0.30 (U.S.) per ad view, depending on the type of ad.
They also have some sort of algorithm that verifies counts, and they only count views that they believe are legitimate. This prevents people from setting up bots to increase video counts and also affects ad counts.
I don’t know the details of their algorithm, but I suspect that it will start rejecting counts after the first couple of repeats. I very much doubt that you are costing this particular political party more than $1 or so.