how is this expensive? the whole campign cost a little less than $4000.

I was wondering what CPM meant. MS earns more than that when Bill Gates farts so it basically amounts to free advertising. Interesting idea, but I wonder if it'll actually have a material effect over and above what people are posting as let's plays anyway. I guess because it comes so cheap MS doesn;t really care if it has no beneficial effect.

I do hope buying opinions of youtubers doesn't backfire in any way.

regardless of how much money you have in the bank something which costs a few thousand dollars is never free, as it was said earlier there are promotion people in MS who would be paid more than the amount their handing out to youtubers just for organizing this. Also when all is said and done they'll have to organise and sort who is getting paid how much and then deal with all the international taxes involved in paying someone in X/Y country.

The total cost of giving out $4000 dollars or so will end up well over $10k in total which, regardless of how much you have, it isn't free. If I go into a store with 1000euros in my pocket it doesn't mean that all the cheaper stuff in the store becomes free to me.

this would only be true if there was no one at Microsoft who asked their PR department to look into spreading word of the New system on social networks, if there was no one at Microsoft PR who sat around and had a meeting of the best Network to get envolved with and the best social media to approach and also if you believed that at the end of the promotion period the money in microsofts bank would automatically know where it was meant to go in the world and exactly how much tax it needed to pay to said countries to pay people for services.

Sell your soul for a measly $3.

I went to check if I'm still subcribed to Machinima, only to notice I'm not. Had I still been, I'd have unsubscribed. I appreciate the transparency here but I very strongly disapprove the thing otherwise.

CPM is short for Cost Per Mile.  The term is very old from the original days of advertising but is expression as a cost per thousand impressions (page views).

I suspect the marketing department is on salary rather than as a consultancy.  Therefore they'd be paid regardless of this campaign, a different campaign or no campaign.

While this is true enough, every man hour that goes into both sides of this must be attributed to the total cost of the project at hand. Just because someone is working in your shop you can't look at his sales of mars bars as being working for free because he is already there can you?

Like I said as well it's not just about their marketing department, while they are the ones who come up with how to advertise, the fact that it will be offering money to youtubers in different Countries around the world who are a part of machinima will mean a bit of paperwork when it comes to sorting out the Taxes for each advertiser and of course an auditor to monitor either the video content or else someone to ensure that Machinima does a good monitoring job of the people on its network. I don't think Microsoft would enjoy paying for a video where a guy says he is playing a game on the X1 and then spends 20 mins bashing it in every aspect and the follow up series of videos where he brags about how he got paid to call Microsoft bad, which in a bad bad youtuber trolls mind would be them paying to advertise this fact....