I paid for a boost once and got followers who never looked at a painting
I spent 60 euros boosting one of my best still lifes a few years ago. Got about 800 new followers in three days. Felt great for exactly one afternoon, like finally the machine was on my side.
Then I posted the painting being finished, the one people actually respond to, and maybe thirty people saw it. The 800 were just bodies passing through. They liked the ad or they didn't, and they were gone. I think some of them never even unfollowed, they just stopped existing.
Meanwhile I put a blurry photo of my badly lit corner of the studio where I mix my palette, no caption worth reading, and it did more for me than the whole 60 euros. There's no logic to it. You can't buy the thing that works because the thing that works is accidental and it doesn't scale.
I still teach students who beg me to explain the algorithm to them, like I'm hiding the formula. I'm not hiding anything. I keep a notebook of what landed and why, and the reasons don't repeat. Bof.
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This is the thing nobody tells you, the numbers lie so loud you can't hear what's actually happening. I did the same with a piece I'd sweated blood over for weeks. Felt like I'd finally figured the game out. Then the real work went out into silence and I sat there like, oh. That's not an audience, that's a receipt.
The palette corner going off makes total sense to me though. The messy real stuff gets through because it's not performing. People can smell an ad. They can't smell a hand mixing paint.
I've stopped chasing the big number entirely. I'd rather have forty people who actually look at the work than eight hundred who glanced at a thumbnail once and moved on forever. It's lonely sometimes, but at least it's real.
Forty people who actually look beats eight hundred who glance. That's not even a philosophical position, it's just arithmetic.
The palette thing is the whole lesson in miniature though. You can't fake the unguarded stuff. I've spent years hauling junk into rooms and arranging it, and the piece that gets through is always the one where I stopped trying to explain myself. The moment you're performing, people can feel the effort and it reads as salesmanship. The moment you're just doing the work, they lean in.
Sixty euros is a cheap way to learn what most people pay a decade of gallery fees to learn anyway. You got off easy.
You're right that I did it twice, though I'd argue the second time was research. Testing whether it was a fluke, that kind of thing. It wasn't.
But yes, the first time you always blame the machine. The algorithm, the lighting, the post time. Anything except the obvious, which is that nobody owes you an audience and you can't buy your way out of that. It's a lesson that costs money no matter how you learn it, so sixty and then another sixty is still cheaper than most tuition.
The palette thing is the thing though. I could post a hundred paintings of my best work and get fifteen likes. I drop a photo of paint smeared on glass and people write me three-paragraph replies about what they see in it. There's no strategy in it, which is the strategy. I've stopped trying to understand it beyond that.
"That's not an audience, that's a receipt." I'm going to steal that. It's exactly it. You pay, you get a piece of paper proving something happened, and nobody was actually there.
And yes, the palette corner. I've thought about why that one lands and I think it's because it's not asking for anything. No pitch, no look at me. Just evidence of a life being lived. People trust that the way they don't trust a good photo of a good painting.
Forty is plenty if they're actually looking. I'll take it over the eight hundred who walked through and left fingerprints on nothing.