Ned Fulmer Is Back on YouTube – And He Is Buying Views?

The former "Try-Guys" member was gone for three years after his cheating-scandal. Now he is back with a new channel on YouTube, but the view count on his videos seems suspicious.

The Backstory

Ned Fulmer was a member of the former BuzzFeed group called Try Guys, that later parted from BuzzFeed and had their own YouTube channel. The very successful comedy and entertainment group made videos, as the name suggests, trying different things.

At that time, Ned was known as the "wife-guy", as he talked about his wife, Ariel, a lot, always telling stories about her and their life together. Their marriage seemed perfect and they even had two children.

But one day in 2022, that image crumbled as footage began circulating showing Ned together with another woman – Alexandria Herring, a producer at the company and working for the creator. He was promptly let go from the TryGuys. The incident was a huge scandal, and Ned's public image was tainted – it seemed like everyone hated him.

A New Beginning

Three years later, Ned suddenly reappeared on YouTube. He rebranded a channel he and his wife used to run and started a podcast called Rock Bottom With Ned Fulmer, where he interviews people who have hit rock bottom. The first episode features himself and his ex-wife Ariel. They discuss the scandal and make it clear that she has not forgiven him, but they both want to move forward.

You can watch the podcast episode here, but be warned – it's a hard watch!

The podcast is not going very well and not receiving a lot of attention. So Ned started another YouTube channel in October 2025, just called Ned Fulmer.

The videos seem to be very well produced and contain a lot of effort, although they do remind of the TryGuys-Videos. At first glance, the effort appears to be paying off: the channel trailer has 1.1 million views with his most successful videos sitting at around one million views.

Is Ned Buying His Views?

As one creator points out, the numbers don't really add up. The podcast episode with his wife has 1.3 million views – and that one went very viral. Some of Ned's videos on his new channel have a similar view count, but no one seems to have heard of them. Moreover, the video with 1 million views only has 885 likes and about 400 comments – most of them being critics. Similar videos from other creators with the same amount of views have several thousand comments and several tens of thousands of likes.

So is Ned buying views? Yes, but not the way you may think: He is not using bots to generate high view counts, but another method. As a creator you can pay to make your video into a YouTube advertisement that plays before, during, or after other YouTube videos. These forced views do count toward the view count of the promoted video. And that is precisely what Ned Fulmer is doing.

In the comments of his most recent video How I Turned Into A Clown he answers another comment by stating:

I have been using YouTube advertising to push my channel in front of new audiences. People seem to think that = bots? I've never used bots either for views or comments, don't even see the point in that.

So yes, he is buying views in the sense that he is paying for YouTube to force people to watch his videos. (Condolences to anyone who had to endure that.)

What he is doing is not illegal, and it is normal for creators to promote their content, but forcing people who don't want to to watch your videos just so you have higher numbers on your channel defeats the spirit of creating content. You create content for the people and not for the numbers (at least, that's why you should be doing it). You should be getting a lot of views because people like you and your content, not because you force them to watch. Because then what is the point? People still don't like you – and the advertisement doesn't even seem to work very well. The newest video without the artificial push only has about 20,000 views. Maybe Ned has to reconsider his strategy.