WolfWraith
I Love YTtalk
Yes they definitely can and this is why I stopped aiming for a world wide target and instead aimed for only English speaking countries. The reason being was that there was a video posted long ago on here explaining how Facebook actually paid people in less fortunate or otherwise "dodgy" (not the best word to use but you'll catch my drift) countries to view stuff. So I only target primary English countries like US, Australia which is mine, New Zealand, UK, Canada, then I target a mix of other English speaking countries like Trinidad, Jamaica etc... Usually like the Caribbean type places basically. Ironically, I've noticed that when I don't target the general globe the system never "over serves" my ads. Which is another theory I had that YouTube allows the "over serving" as that results in advertising for them like someone says "oh wow, I used AdWords, paid $5 for 100 views but they gave me 10,000 for the same price!" naturally people are more willing to take a chance, not anyone's fault not the person who suggests it or the person who uses it.
But you're not alone in your suspicions about it, I also have to keep an open and unbiased mind that it can be my content not having much quality, but then that time I hit 6,000 views on a video that I spent $5 (which originally was meant to get around 300-500 views) doesn't explain why the retention from those random non-speaking countries was so high and that means 2 things given the lack of interaction 1) they pay people via an automated system to watch video ads from start to finish (very doable) or 2) people really, really enjoyed and by some spontaneous reasoning; all decided not to interact with it in anyway. Another issue I noticed while using it, during that time I got those 6,000 views my sub count was climbing a tiny bit, but each person who had subscribed had odd names that seemed foreign AND when I checked their channels some of them were subscribed to thousands and thousands of channels in the same way I noticed that people who liked my old Facebook page also had liked thousands of pages, naturally meaning there was nill chance of them interacting with mine out of the ocean of posts they'd get.
That's not to say that AdWords is completely flawed, you just need to know how to use it and target areas properly (but you won't see such a great advantage), views are great but they're nothing but numbers, there's no comments to put a face to those numbers. Just be careful when using it.
