My Opinions towards Growtopia Giveaways on YouTube

YouTubers have many strategies to interact with their fanbase. One of them is to give gifts to random fans, usually their subscribers. When YouTubers choose winners, they usually use sites like this. This is called a giveaway, and it is very popular among YouTube.

Today I would like to talk about ones in Growtopia, one of the games first developed by Seth and Hamumu, then purchased by Ubisoft in February 2017.

What are these YouTubers giving away to their fans?

Obviously, they distribute diamond locks and world locks. Growtopians, players who play Growtopia, never fail to be attracted by these shiny locks, and try to obtain them as much as possible because they are a direct contributor to how rich a Growtopian is.

Sometimes these YouTubers send out non-lock items to their fanbase. Some common items include:

• Wings and Capes
• Hand items
• ... and some other purely cosmetic items.
• Very rare items like MAGPLANT 5000 and Rayman's Fists

Here is one example, in a thumbnail-styled form extracted from a video on YouTube.

Now we see what a Growtopia giveaway is like.

So what's wrong with them?

There are mainly 2 things that made the giveaways wrong.

Too Good to be True

The title sums it up. The prizes are so attracting and rediculous that it can be hardly believed. I have came across this article by Easypromos and it mentions some tricks these YouTubers use to trick viewers.

An excerpt from the website says:

Brands love to give away grand prizes. But they have to be realistic: you can’t give every customer a new car, or the latest iPhone. Be cautious about a giveaway which offers enormous prizes, especially if the prize is via money transfer or from a small brand.

This is for real-life situations, but it could be applied to the environment in Growtopia as well. While people may give away iPhones and gift cards in real life to their customers, Growtopians give away World Locks, cosmetic items, and more, of course, in Growtopia, as I have said above.

As they host fake giveaways, their fanbase will eventually figure out all of the truth and unsubscribe to the giveaway provider and block the provider, hence wiping out his/her reputation.

However, sometimes the host is actually kind and generous and wanted to thank his/her fanbase, so he/she conducted a real giveaway. But there may be potential harms, which is discussed next.

Doing Harm to their Channels

This might sound odd, but it is actually a real problem for most Growtopia YouTubers.

Look at the picture below, and tell me if there's something odd here.

1. Subscribe to the channel
2. Turn on all Notifications
3. Like all videos
4. Comment GrowID and World Name

When such comments are filling up the comment section, it is just so hurting to see such comment format being repeated again and again, for over 6,000 times. There may be more extreme ones.

If one continues to do that, comments by those who actually watches the content are completely lost (They are not actually lost; they just can't be found easily.), and these giveaway participants will continue leaving such GrowID + World Name comments just for the grand prize, which can ruin the whole point of a Comment Section. Thus, a channel that has over 100,000 subscribers could only get around 10% of the subscriber amount of views per video.

Why do these bad ones even exist?

I think this point from Easypromos is enough to explain:

Instagram giveaways are a very powerful way to get more followers organically. A good giveaway will result in more followers, without demanding specific numbers or bullying people.

Although the original one targets Instagram only, in actuality, it is true for other platforms as well, including YouTube. As the video gets more views, it gets more attention, and it is recommended to more people by YouTube's algorithm. Their first impression is the giveaway announcement on the video, so they did what the video told without thinking that much (if the main audience is teenagers or children). Furthermore, the due condition, the criteria the giveaway ends, can affect how much attention it gets as well. For example, would you believe a YouTube who just joined the platform hosted a 100 Diamond-Lock giveaway that will end at 1,000 subscribers or 90 days after the giveaway video was published?

In Conclusion

Hosting giveaways on YouTube indeed is a good way to help someone flourish, but it should not be used too much, or it can have detrimental effects on his/her channel.