If you are paying per view, someone will eventually try to sell you views they bought for a fraction of your rate. The good news is that purchased traffic looks different from real traffic in ways that are hard to disguise.
The curve is the strongest signal
Genuine reach has a shape. It starts slowly, accelerates if the platform decides to push the clip, peaks, and decays over days. Bought views arrive as a block — a few thousand within an hour, then almost nothing. The pattern is unmistakable once you have seen a few of each.
Engagement ratios
At any given reach, real clips produce a fairly predictable band of likes, comments and shares. Purchased view packages rarely include proportionate engagement, because engagement costs more to fake. A clip reporting 200,000 views and 300 likes is telling you something.
- →Low single-digit percentage likes-to-views is normal for short-form.
- →Below roughly 0.2% at a thousand views or more is the automated fraud floor — that low, at scale, the views are unlikely to be real.
- →Implausibly HIGH like-rates matter too. Above about 35% suggests bought likes rather than genuine reach.
- →Zero comments on a clip with real reach is atypical, even though comments are always far below likes.
- →Shares and saves are the hardest to fake and the most reassuring when present.
The account tells you a lot
Look at the poster's other content. If one clip has 200,000 views and everything else has 400, that could be a genuine breakout — they do happen, and it is the whole appeal of the format. But combined with a flat curve and thin engagement, it stops being a coincidence.
What to do about it
Hold rather than reject. Ask for the platform analytics screenshot showing the traffic source and the view curve, which is difficult to fabricate convincingly. Genuine clippers supply it without complaint; the alternative rarely responds.
And build the check into the campaign rather than doing it by eye. Verification applied consistently to every submission is what makes a per-view pool viable at all — spot checks catch the careless and miss the systematic.
Every Clipd submission is verified before it earns.
How verification works