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A new video is taking off on the internet, particularly among Facebook page admins. Made by the YouTube channel Veritasium, which primarily makes and posts popular science-related videos, this video takes on a slightly different subject: advertising on Facebook. In the video, Veritasium host and Creative Director Derek Muller talks about Facebook likes and the various ways to obtain them, and then several experiments that led him to conclude that paying for Facebook likes in any way may be counterproductive and cost admins even more money in the long run.

To understand why Facebook likes and other measures of engagement such as likes, comments, and shares on posts are important, it is important to understand the concept of EdgeRank. EdgeRank is a proprietary gradation system developed by Facebook to tell it how popular some pages are when compared to others, and to a lesser extent which posts of a particular page are better than others. At its heart, Facebook is a popularity contest, and EdgeRank is a way to codify this. Pages with more EdgeRank are more likely to be seen by fans, and the more popular a post is on a page, the more people who will organically see it, which is to say, more people will see the post without the admin having to pay.

So how does an admin get more people to like a page? Well, there are several ways. The most common way, because it is free, is to allow the page’s likes to grow naturally and organically. If you post good things, and people like and share them, their friends may then see these posts and also be drawn to like the page. Another way is to buy likes, either through a third-party company (known as a click-farm) or through Facebook itself, via Facebook advertising. It is important to note that paying for third-party likes is against Facebook’s terms of service, and any page caught doing it is liable to be deleted. Additionally, as Muller explains, since these click farm accounts are fake, they may not really provide good likes.

In theory, getting more people to like a page or a particular post can up the EdgeRank and thus put the page in front of more people. At least, that’s the idea, although according to Muller, this doesn’t really seem to hold true in the real world. This is because of engagement. When you make a post, Facebook initially only shows it to around 5 percent of your followers, and then uses their reactions (via clicks, likes, comments, and shares) to decide how many of the rest will see it. Posts that get lots of engagement get shown to more people, but admins may find themselves needing to pay for their followers to see posts without much engagement. Because click farm likes essentially come from fake accounts, these accounts are likely to provide very little, if any, engagement.

Muller then gives Facebook some credit, saying that they are unlikely to be paying these same click farms to generate likes when you pay Facebook directly for advertising. Regardless, Muller says that when he did pay Facebook for more likes, he found that many of his likes came from these fake accounts anyway. Why does he think this happens? He suspects that in order to hide which sites are paying for likes, these click farm accounts will like almost anything and everything. So, although you aren’t paying them to click, they are being reached by Facebook advertisements and are clicking on them.

Bad likes are bad likes, Muller points out, no matter who you paid for them. Bad likes dilute engagement and ultimately hurt a page’s reach, causing admins to have to pay again to get their posts out, creating a vicious cycle. Facebook has been hurting for revenue and ways to monetize its product, and it generates a lot of money of this process. Thus, it has little incentive to work very hard on changing it.

TL;DR? Watch the video here: