He would pay to have his videos as ads on other people’s videos.

E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s).

That was an interesting era of YouTube, for sure.

This is an example of the fact that while only 1% would watch the whole thing, they just raised their hands as the marks, to be worked on through the whole funnel.

A view counts as a view before the full video though, so running it as an ad still makes it look like you have an audience.

Is that against TOS? Was it scam?

It's not against YouTube's ToS to run pre-roll ads of any length, of course. But I think he was just selling get-rich-quick schemes or something. At the time YouTube ads were more rare and generally short, like 15 second TV commercials, so it was weird to see long-form content as ads. He absolutely saturated the site with this ad for a while to the point that it became a meme. I'm guessing a significant percentage of YouTube's user base at the time was served that ad at least once.

Yeah I still occasionally get really long ads that must be just to see who watches all (most?) of them.

He defrauded investers out of $120M.

I couldn't find any record of a conviction with a cursory google

https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas... They are not convicted yet.

When people leave autoplay on, they might not even realize they watched an ad, I guess?

There are armies of bad parents or babysitters that just hand baby an Ipad, not on child or restricted mode, and just let youtube literally Clockwork Orange a human being.

It's horrifying.