"I can give you YouTube SEO, Monetised easily, More views/Subscribers..."
This is what you will hear from people when you are trying to get that milestone of 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours watch time. They will contact you via email or social media, highlighting your low numbers, your SEO score. They will tell you that they can increase your views and get you more subscribers, but this is far from truth. They use a program called VidIQ, which is available to everyone (Free version available too), and it shows your YouTube statistics.
Buying subscribers, views, or watch time will hurt your channel? How?
When you buy subscribers, it just adds a number to your subscriber total, nothing more. You won't get engagement, comments, or even any of them watching your content. You are paying for the number solely.
Buying views is also a bad idea, as in order for a view to show on your channel, someone must watch your video for 30 seconds. This is all the bots will do. If you order 500 views, a series of bots will watch your video for 30 seconds, before it stops. YouTube will see that your video is getting views but dropping after 30 seconds, meaning it won't bother pushing your video out there.
When it comes to watch time, they require a video of a set length (30 minutes or more), and it will set bots to watch that video till it reaches 4000 hours. You may get monetised, but having one video receive that much attention may lead to YouTube taking action if it's found that it hasn't been achieved naturally.
I know it can be frustrating to put a video on YouTube and it get little engagement. For the first few months, I had around 12 subscribers and less that 500 views on all my videos combined, meaning my watch time was non existent. It was a long learning curve, patience, and finding what works. In my case, sometimes it works, other times it may be slow, but it's all about pushing forward, not giving up, and making each video better than the last.
If you want to get more views and more subscribers, then it's all down to learning for yourself and hard work, as there are no easy routes. It's all down to these factors:
Eye catching thumbnail with text
Keyword based title
Keyword based description
Relevant hashtags
Relevant tags
And in some cases, luck
Now, unless you are a trend follower, a clickbait type, then it will start off slow. You won't see massive numbers, or your subscribers going up by the hundred, but what you will have is genuine engagement, rather than bots or fake accounts.
Hard work will lead to reward. Stay consistant, be yourself, and learn from your previous video (See how you could have improved it, and adapt that to your next video).
I will do more YouTube blogs discussing my YouTube journey, and tips and tricks. Stay tuned.
Good luck.