Hey guys, it's Celestia, and I just paid 26 dollars to let an art promotion account steal and repost
my art. You know, as a treat. For you. It's a gift. Do you like it? You can't take it back, there's no
receipt, but you shouldn't want to anyway, because hopefully, I did it so you don't have to, and now
we can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that those accounts are scams. But before I share
this fun little adventure with you, let me take a quick moment to thank today's sponsor: me. And
Printify. As some of you may know, Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I take it unnecessarily
and ridiculously seriously for the entire month of October every year. Like, I make it my life. I
live the rest of the year waiting for this month. And as such, I made as much Halloween-themed merch
as I could possibly make in the limited time I had to do so, and Printify helped me put that on
merch. They even let me try out some new products for free, including this blanket, notebook, and all-
over-print sweatshirt. As you can see, I don't need to tell you to buy my Halloween merch; the
merch speaks for itself, in a chorus of haunting, inescapable meows that pierce your your soul and
haunt your dreams. All of these products will be available on my store whenever this video goes
live, in addition to the other designs that you're seeing now, because I was incredibly impressed with
their quality and more than reassured enough by it to start selling them, so check it all out via
the link to my store in the description, because Halloween month deserves to be celebrated right.
Go hard or go home. If you're also an artist and are interested in creating merch of your own
without the worry of buying stock that you're not sure will sell, please check out Printify.
They're a print-on-demand fulfillment company that allows you to put your designs on over 700
potential products easily and affordably, which is a simple and painless process that I explained
in the video linked in the iCard above, if you're interested but not sure how to start. Please check
out Printify via the link in the description to start selling your own spooky art today. Now, all
that aside, let's get into the disaster that is the art promotion accounts flooding everyone's
comments on Instagram, because I didn't pay one the price of several packs of Pokemon cards to
not talk about this. I could be organizing those cards into my Gengar binder right now, and I'm
not, because I don't have them, and it's because of you. You did this. Jokes aside, this really is
a big problem, and it's one that I think a lot of you have seen firsthand. It's hard to post or even
consume art on Instagram without coming across one or many of those comments that we all know and hate:
"DM this to this account to get it promoted". They're a dime a dozen, probably because the vast majority
of them have bots automatically posting these comments on anything they find in a particular
hashtag. And most people, at this point, DO know that they're scams. I don't think that's going to
come as much of a surprise to anyone listening. I'm not making this video with any illusions that I'm
going to be the first to tell you that that's the case, although part of my reason for making it IS
absolutely to inform and warn anyone who doesn't know. The other part, though, is to explain to you
how the scam works, why it's such a problem, and what actually happens when you do DM your art to
"art underscore promo underscore underscore 75,000", so let's do that. To start, though, if you're somehow
unfamiliar with these accounts, here's the one that I used for this little experiment: underscore art
underscore e underscore xpo underscore underscore. So, a very reputable name that inspires
trust right off the bat. They have 8,574 followers as of writing this, and their description lists
them as an art promotion account and encourages people to DM them to get their work promoted. As
you can see by looking at their posts, nothing is their own. You can also see my art living on
potentially indefinitely amongst the sea of other promoted art, unfortunately, but that's the cost of
the pseudo-investigative journalism that YouTubers like me live and die for. Anyway, that's what these
accounts do: they comment on artists work to get them to DM to promote it, at which point they will
then offer you a variety of different unbelievably expensive rates that you can pay for them to do so.
Some of them, this one included, even promise that you'll gain very specific numbers of followers
from being promoted on their accounts, which is something I'll get into more later. The point
is, on the surface, these accounts seem to operate somewhat legitimately: you're paying to have your
art featured on an account with a large number of followers, and they ARE posting it, so what's the
scam? Well, their followers are fake and most of the art's stolen, and I can prove it. Let's start with
the art, because it's a comparatively much bigger problem than the followers, at least in terms of
how it harms artists. So looking back at our good buddy Art Expo's account, we can see that on the
surface, all of these seem like they're just pieces of art that artists paid to promote. But if you
look a little closer, you can notice a few primary details that suggest that that's not the case. See,
look at the post they did for my art. I'm tagged in it-- irrelevant gripe, but I'm tagged in it after 10
spaced out periods in a way that doesn't even give me explicit credit as its creator, which is just
fantastic. Anyway, there are more like that, as you can see, where the artist whose art it is is tagged
in the post, so we can probably safely assume that that's what this account always does for people
who pay for promotion. But looking through the rest of their posts shows that the vast majority
of them have no artist tagged or credit given, so why not? Well, presumably, because they stole the
art and reposted it without permission. And because I am the self-appointed art police, I spent a few
hours reverse image searching all of them, and I did find a few artists to contact about their work
being reposted, like this one, for example. Others, unfortunately, I was unable to source like these
ones, so if you happen to recognize any of them, please either send me their contact info so that
I can let them know, or do so yourself, because I don't want to see accounts like this profit
even indirectly from the theft of their work. But beyond actual art theft, I also discovered another
interesting fact: at least 20 of this account's posts are stolen in an entirely different way.
While reverse image searching, I found quite a few of the original pieces on Pinterest with a
watermark that said ColorScapes. Upon Googling ColorScapes, I learned that this was actually
one of those coloring book apps where you are basically given an artist's linework and you
can drag color into it, like a digital paint-by-numbers. So I downloaded it to look through its
library, and lo and behold, I was able to match the vast majority of this account's content to this
app, which means that Art Expo, and many other similar accounts as a quick check showed, is
claiming the art from these apps as their own and editing out the watermark that can prove otherwise.
This also makes reverse image searching these pieces unbelievably difficult, because the colors
are different in every rendition of them, so the algorithm for the reverse search can't recognize
them nearly as well, if at all. It's actually genius, unfortunately, and also reprehensible. It gives the
illusion that either the account is making this art themselves, or has a vastly larger amount of
art promotion customers than it really does, and is deliberately erasing the actual artist's credit
in the process. And all of that only applies to accounts that even bother to hide it; others will
openly acknowledge that they're reposting artists work without permission, and have descriptions
like "email us about copyright issues" or "DM us for credit, it's your right", as if that makes them
generous, good, moral people. So at this point, we've pretty clearly established that whether it's clear
and shameless or a little more deceptive, the art that these accounts post is usually stolen, even
if they do have a few legitimately paid credited promoted art posts scattered throughout them. Now
it's time to establish how the accounts themselves are almost always fake. By fake, what I mean is that
the basis of their business is effectively to have a lot of followers to entice people to promote
their art to those followers. The artist only gets actual value from this transaction if the account
has a lot of followers. And for the most part, they LOOK like they do. Most of them have a minimum
of five thousand, and many have over two hundred thousand, but they aren't real. Some of them might
be-- in the process of doing research for this video. I came across one that my father-in-law follows,
and I'm like, 90% sure he's a real human being. But the vast majority are not; just a quick glance at
Art Expo's followers will show you that yes, there are some actual people in there, but there are also
a lot of followers that are just first name, last name, and then a number. Those accounts are almost
always bots, created with the sole purpose of making these art promotion accounts look like
they have a huge following. In many cases, when the accounts do what I mentioned earlier and
offer guaranteed numbers of followers from their promotions, they also use these bot accounts to
provide those followers. I don't know exactly how it works, like-- some of them might use external
services to buy followers for both themselves and their clients, or some of them might have
those bots themselves to use for those purposes, but I do know that buying them is cheap as hell
and incredibly easy. For context, the service that I found when researching this video lets you buy
Instagram followers at rates of anywhere from $3 for a hundred to $85
for ten thousand, and all the way up to $200 for twenty five thousand. And
like, yes, $200 is a lot of money, but $200 to make your account
look like it's wildly popular and therefore a promising investment for artists to promote on
is nothing given how much they charge for that promotion. Most art promotion accounts I DM'd
charged at least $20 for a single post, with options for multiple posts ranging anywhere
from $40 to a $130, which means that they could buy themselves a seemingly
legitimate and engaged following and pay that off with just a few customers. But how do I know these
aren't legitimate and engaged followers? Because they're not engaging. Instagram doesn't show likes
anymore, so it's difficult to compare the number of likes their posts are getting to the number
of followers that they have, but we can definitely see the comments. Looking at Art Expo again, you can
see that the account has over 8,500 followers, as we established, but most of their posts have
zero comments, and at best, some get three or four. Often from other art promotion accounts with the
infamous "DM it to my account to promote it". This is the case for most if not all of these accounts,
and that is damning enough proof to say that the majority of their followers are fake. And
if their followers are fake and their business is based exclusively on them being real, then
their business is a scam. So naturally I came to that conclusion and decided to give one my money,
which was a mistake that I'm still suffering from, as I'll explain in a minute, but it DID yield some
interesting and informative results, so let's look at those. I DM'd Art Expo asking for their
prices, which they provided, as you can see here. I then asked if their promotion packages came
with access to the analytics for the promoted posts and stories, so that I could monitor the
engagement myself, at which point he sent me a litany of screenshots which he proceeded to
immediately unsend before I could see them. I asked him to resend them, and he sent three, which just
showed screenshots of accounts before and after promotion with a significant increase in followers,
which didn't answer my question, so I asked again, and he said yes, and asked which package I wanted.
I then chose the cheapest package, which came with a post, a story, and a thousand followers, but
specifically requested not to get the followers, because I mean-- I know they're fake, and I don't
want fake followers. He agreed to that, I paid him-- a payment that, interestingly, went to Computer
Network/Information Services-- and he posted the art that I sent him as a story and a post. As
you can see from my analytics during this time, I saw almost no increase in engagement as a result
of this promotion. As for his analytics, he did not send them on his own despite my earlier request.
I asked him to send a screenshot of the post and story's insights, and he asked if I wanted another
post promoted. I said no, just the analytics, he said okay, and then never sent them. I asked again,
he sent me a screenshot of the post that showed that it got 3020 likes and a whopping two comments.
I asked again because that's not the goddamn analytics, and he finally said "you wait some time".
I'm guessing this reluctance and then postponing is because he knew that no one saw the story or
post and he needed a hot minute to send his bots to go look at it. That's-- that's not really a guess,
actually, because after I waited some time, he sent the analytics, and those pretty much proved it.
Because unfortunately for our boy Art underscore Expo underscore whatever, showing the analytics
for one story actually shows the number of views the previous stories got as well, so I got to see
the number of views all four of his most recent stories, mine included, received. Every single one
of them got exactly 8,921 views. I don't think that can even vaguely be excused or written off
as coincidence. You can also see that every single one of the viewers shown in his screenshot was a
first name last name number account, which we've established are bots. Based on all of that alone,
I was and still am very confident in asserting that my awful little experiment has proven that
these accounts are scams, and their followers are fake. So I thanked Art Expo and called it a day.
And then he started asking me how I liked his result, and to promote more art, and inexplicably
just sent me a screenshot of his follower list even though I had long since stopped responding.
He also started liking all of my posts, just in case he wasn't already being as hard to ignore
as my cat at dinner time. It was also around this time that I started getting DMs from other art
promotion accounts saying "oh hey, I saw you got this promoted - how much did you pay for that, and
how many followers did you get?" clearly leading up to trying to sell me on their promotion services
as being better, which was all very fun. Had a great time. Loved it. Awesome stuff. It still hasn't
stopped, either: Art Expo DM'd me just "Hi friend" and nothing else the other day, and then a few
days later, sent me my own post and said "you NEED to get this promoted on my account", so it looks
like business is not booming for our poor little scammer friend. Tragic. Maybe I'll send him this
video and see if he's interested in promoting it on his story. But all that in mind, I hope I've done
an adequate job explaining to you guys why all of these art promotion accounts are scams, because
God knows I have paid dearly to do so-- not just the actual money, mind you, but the headache of dealing
with this a**hole and all of the following a**holes trying to vulture their way into a quick buck.
Don't promote your art on these accounts, guys, just-- don't do it it's a nightmare that never ends, and
I hope that in making this video I've prevented at least one artist from making this mistake. Or given
you guys some misery to laugh at, if nothing else. I mean, whatever works. You can also avoid getting
these comments by blacklisting certain terms, like 'promotion', for example, in your Instagram settings,
so you should look into that if you want to just stop seeing them, because I mean-- I personally tend
to just respond 'no' in creative ways because it brings me amusement, but even that gets tiring
eventually, and seeing them is just, I-- I don't know anyone who doesn't find it irritating. Thank you
guys for watching, and I hope you enjoyed today's video! Special thank you as always to channel
members Cafe Soleil, Joseph Solomon, Unknown Code, Lucian is Apa, and Abyss Reborn, as well as patrons
Batman, Kyle Low, blueswanson, thisistotallymyname, Uni Tea, Cora Feere, Jamesha Walker, ShiromeArtiste,
Elenxji, Soul Crystal, and Kim Nguyen for their support, and I'll see you in the next one!
thank you