A man bought a “dead” YouTube channel with 170,000 subscribers in the hopes of bringing it back to its former glory.
YouTuber Sambucha purchased the channel for $1,250 to see if he’d be able to bring it back to life.
Documenting the process on his own channel, the man explained how he’d bought an inactive Minecraft channel before hiring someone to act as the face of it.
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Finding a man for the job named Mark Bowen on Fiverr, Sambucha got to work writing him a handful of scripts for him to read out on the new channel.
Once they’ve been recorded and edited, the YouTuber was ready for the channel to make its big comeback.
In the video, he said: “All five videos are scheduled out starting with 7:00 today which is in about one hour and then the rest of the videos are going to follow about a day after.”
He went on to add: “I'll check on this, then we'll ultimately decide if we have revived this dead YouTube channel. I'm hoping to get around like 1,000 views, I feel like that'll do it, maybe one video gets 5,000 views, who knows.
“This is a fun experiment, let's see what happens.”
However, it looks like reviving on an old channel is harder than you might think.
The most popular video Sambucha posted peaked at 19 views, with the worst one getting just four views.
None of the clips earned the channel any new subscribers, in fact, the channel had lost 76 followers in the last 28 days.
Although, it wasn’t all bad news. As a result of the recent activity, the channel itself gained 492 new views.
Sambucha added: “I think in total it's really hard to say whether or not this was a success or not.
“I guess relative to where the channel was we forexed our views but then we also lost a lot of subscribers so I don't know.
“We didn't make any money and this was just like a total loss in terms of the return on the investment so I don't think I'm going to do this again.”
In the comment section, viewers shared their thoughts, with one user writing: “I don't think giving advice shorts on a Minecraft channel looks legit…”
Another offered advice, saying: “Being a YouTuber is very similar to running your own business. You should upload things people want to see, just like businessman should offer product/service that people need.”
And a third added: “bro really said ‘nah, i don't want a meme channel’ just to s***post on a Minecraft account.”