Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
A 9-year-old burned $118,000 of his dad’s company card on YouTube ads. As the little one thought more money meant more views. Mike is nine. He runs a YouTube channel called Mighty Mike Plays, where he posts Minecraft and Roblox gameplay. Like every small creator, he was frustrated that nobody was watching. So his father, Dave, sat him down and walked him through a $20 YouTube ad campaign, how to set a budget, pick an audience, and hit go.
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Mike learned the lesson. Just not the part about the budget. Over the next three weeks, he went back into the ad tools on his own and kept launching campaigns. Dave’s company credit card was already saved to the Google account, so every new campaign quietly charged straight to his employer. “The logic was simple, I guess. More money, more views,” Dave said in a video posted to Mike’s channel explaining the whole mess. And the bill came to roughly $118,000, which is around Rs 1.13 crores.
Dave says the first he knew of it was when he got called into a room with his manager, corporate staff and the finance team, who slid a three-week breakdown of ad spending across the table and asked him to explain it. He still doesn’t know whether he’ll be asked to pay it back, or whether he’ll keep the job.
But the interesting part is, the trick worked. Some of Mike’s videos pulled around 200,000 views. YouTube users started noticing unusually long Minecraft and Roblox clips showing up in their ad slots, which is exactly what $118,000 buys you.
When Dave finished lamenting on what his son had done and asked Mike for a reply, he said, “I’m definitely cooked.”
The family says they may pause the channel. Spending limits, parental controls and deleting saved payment details are all coming.
Worth keeping one thing in mind, though: every detail here comes from Dave’s own video on his son’s channel. There’s no confirmation from the employer, no proof of the charges, and no independent verification that any of it happened
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
