Like lemmings to the sea, everyone’s throttling YouTube with their stuff in hope of fame. Want a little secret? It’s hard as hell to breakout on YouTube. If you want quantity of views, you’re much better off in Google Video, Yahoo Video and some of the third-tier sites.
Why? It’s the best kept viral video secret. I almost didn’t want to tell anyone. Here’s the poop.
Your views are not just a function of the traffic to the site. It has a lot to do with the total number of videos on a site. Your ability to “break out” is impacted by the ratio of: (traffic to a site/videos on a site).
YouTube may have a lot of eyeballs, but there are two problems:
- It’s flooded with competition. Too many videos.
- It’s built around focus on the most popular. So it’s very difficult to breakout.
The difference between views on YouTube vs. Google Video is especially interesting. Almost every one of my videos on Google Video has several thousands views. Most of my YouTube videos have fewer than 1000. Same content, different channel.
And then sometimes you get more views on the third-tier sites because they are submitting your videos to the (first-tier?) sites. For instance, Grouper submits your stuff to YahooVideo. I’ve seen my BlipTV stuff submitted by them elsewhere.
Should be interesting once Google Video starts showing ads, and hopefully, sharing revenue. Two important points RE: GV…
1. The new “video” link now showing on the top of G search results that you pointed out earlier has the potential to send a flood of traffic to your Gvids (and your web site).
Traffic to my dopey hot chicks video has nearly quadrupled since they added this feature this week. Now pushing 4,000 views/day.
2. If you implement SEO-like techniques w/ GV, you have the opportunity to greatly increase your rankings/viewings. e.g., keywords in title, transcript, tags, etc.
I’ve managed to get this video to rank in the top 5 for incredibly competitive terms (e.g., “naked“) by doing this.
joe
http://www.WebVideoZone.com
Classic “me too” comment…. “Me too!”
I’m seeing a lot of visibility on smaller sites (although possibly less viewer interactivity…. fewer comments per clip) (and it’s all about comments, or not….)
I do a nice steady flow on Gogle though I should probably go back and revamp my keywords. Filling in data on Google is a chore….