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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

Bemmu, you mentioned you tried YT ads. Have you tried to build an audience on YT? For example with unwrapping / “reviews” of some of the candies.

I know there are tons of people watching similar things (though my 1st hand exp is just seeing how my kid wants to spend infinite amount of time watching surprise eggs unwrapping).

Just a hunch, but that might have a bigger ROI than ads.

Thanks for the writeup, love the openness!

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I was discouraged from doing this after having someone make such a video that generated millions of views, but no sales at all (https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/sales-results-f...). (Just noticed that video has since been removed for "violating community guidelines", I wonder what's up with that)

But I'm still a bit motivated to make more videos, because at 10k subscribers you get to visit the Roppongi YouTube space :-) Here's the old channel we haven't really updated in a long time: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWrpxBNP8LukXGd4xQIDxg

Send free boxes to YouTubers, if you haven't already.

I wouldn’t discount YouTube based on that experience. That channel looks to be one of the channels that drives a lot of views through children, specifically, children watch and watch and watch these videos on TVs (driving up the viewcounts) but aren’t engaged, they aren’t going to convert to customers. You may wish to try more targeted channels, i.e channels with an engaged audience of people who like Japanese culture. A video with 1,000 views to people who are enamoured with Japanese culture will perform significantly better than that video.

> though my 1st hand exp is just seeing how my kid wants to spend infinite amount of time watching surprise eggs unwrapping

If kids are the main demographic, I doubt they generate a lot of ROI.

I think you're wrong about children not having purchasing power. Remember all those toy commercials on TV during Saturday morning cartoons? Those advertisers weren't just throwing money away, they were marketing to kids, and those kids then bugged their parents to purchase the toys.

The same holds true for YouTube; in fact I might go so far as to say it's even more powerful today. Kids are choosing the videos to watch and people to subscribe to. That means they have an interest and are actively participating in the process. I would think this would make them a better target with a higher ROI. Especially if the investment is a couple of hours of video creation.

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