Probably not, I thought it might help with attract young guys eyes (I think my key demographic is younger males). It hasn't proven to work, but I can't say I don't like it.
But that type of feedback is what I need, someone to say, this idea sucks. All my friends either ignore my requests for feedback or just say some generic positive response which is fine, but doesn't help me.
It's not that it's a bad idea, I just don't think it's a priority to be spending money on it, and I doubt it will help enough to warrant it. It may get a second look if your video shows up in a search, but the more important question is how people are finding your videos to begin with. If they're searching for the relevant search terms, would your video show up in the pages of results? If they watch it, what makes it unique from the rest? Is there anything in your videos that compels people to share it around? People will subscribe if your video entertains them enough, and your channel in general gives them something they don't get from other channels they already follow. Gaming channels are hard to start these days because it's an oversaturated area due to the low barrier of entry, and the fun people have doing it whether it's profitable or not.
Well I envision the girl more like my face to represent the "brand" in a way. I use the picture of her holding my logo in almost all of my youtube thumbnails as a way of showing the "brand". I figured it would be like eye candy. So far, I haven't seen anything to prove this has worked, at all. But I personally didn't find the $25 investment as too much since it put some sort of identity to my channel that I did not have before, and while I put myself in a lot of my videos, I don't want my ugly face to be the logo for my channel. (I actually thought about this today when I saw on twitter some other gamer's logo to be him and he was so ugly that I thought "Wow Im glad to have this girl").
As for how do I get exposure, through google adwords is one way. But that costs money. I started tweeting all my videos and increasing my twitter presence to promote my channel. I think this works, but not on a large scale, not yet at least. I get a lot more followers on twitter but it hasn't lead to subscribers on youtube. I know for a fact a lot of my videos show up on search results, I suggest downloading tubebuddy which is a chrome extension and it shows you where you rank in searches. Not all of my videos rank, but some do, and some of my music videos rank fairly highly actually. Just type in "Now the world" in youtube and my video will pop up.
Granted, my biggest hits on youtube are music videos that I have no ownership over. BUT, my idea was to use the music videos which draws people to my channel to get them to watch my other videos that I own and can monetize (I do this by setting up playlists, using cards, and ends screens). I'm actually slowly (as in EXTREMELY slowly) seeing some gains here the more and more videos I post. That's exactly why I said I have a soft goal of one video per week. I think that's been the best way for me to get exposure.
As for my gaming videos, the only thing that makes them unique (I think) is my commentary and reactions. I haven't seen many videos done the way I do them. Example (and honestly, I think this is my best video)
Battlefield 1 Behemoth Comeback where its an entire match condensed to about 7 minutes with my live playing commentary mixed in with my after the game commentary to explain a story of what happened in the game (while being extremely over dramatic).
Do you have any tips or tricks?