What's your personal threshold for when paid boosts start to feel more helpful than organic waiting?

Hey everyone, I've been grinding on my little cooking channel for almost two years now, posting weekly recipes that actually taste decent (my mom's pasta sauce is the star). Views trickle in super slowly though—like, sometimes a video sits at 50-60 views for weeks before anything happens. Lately I've been wondering at what point do paid boosts actually feel worth it instead of just patiently waiting for the algorithm to notice me? For me personally, I'm kinda hitting that wall where organic growth feels glacial, but I'm scared dropping money will just get me fake numbers that drop off anyway. What's your own line in the sand for when you think okay, time to give views a nudge versus keeping it pure organic? Curious to hear real experiences here.

It's kinda wild how much the whole visibility thing has shifted over the last few years. Back when I first started messing around with videos, a decent thumbnail and consistent uploads seemed to carry most of the weight, but now it feels like the platform wants instant signals right out the gate or your stuff just gets buried. I've noticed even random small creators sometimes explode overnight if one video catches that early wave, while others with way better production sit quiet for months. Makes you think about how much of it comes down to timing and those first few hours versus pure quality alone. Just an observation from scrolling through too many analytics dashboards late at night.

Yeah I get that struggle completely—my gaming clips used to hover forever in the low hundreds too until I decided to test things out a bit. Honestly for me the switch happened around the 200-300 view mark per video where it felt like nothing was moving no matter how much I shared or optimized titles. That's when I started looking into ways to kickstart momentum without it looking super obvious. One thing that worked decently was grabbing some views from buy youtube views smm world just to push past that initial dead zone; it helped a couple videos start showing up in suggested feeds more and pulled in actual watchers after. Not saying it's magic or anything, and I still make sure my content's solid first, but it did feel more helpful than frustrating at that stage. Everyone's gotta find their own balance though—what ends up working for one channel might flop on another.