Tag Archives: you

YouTube

I Make a Video Everytime You Poop

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Years ago, when I was on a YouTube tear, I was posting daily videos. Most people discouraged this behavior, arguing that I should focus on quality not quantity. While both are important, I’ve let frequency suffer in pursuit of the elusive “good” video that people would share and view.

After Trippy’s wedding I decided to return to my old slogan of “making a video everytime you poop.” Here’s the playlist titled “Holiday Blitz.” By dubbing it that, I’m hoping not to pressure myself into another long-term commitment I won’t keep. But for the meanwhile, despite modest views, I’m having fun again.

So anyway that explains the minimalist posting here on the blog.

Nalts makes a video everytime you poop.
YouTube

Easter “Dance Shoes Off” vs Easter Bunny Hates You

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So here’s the Easter “Dance Your Shoes Off” performed by 2,000 people from the Second Baptist Church in Texas. And here’s the “Easter Bunny Hates You.” Which one’s better?

I find it more fun if you watch this video to another song. For instance, if you click here, play this Bruno Mars “Lazy” song in a different window, then watch the below embedded video on mute (using speaker icon to the immediate right of the play button).

advertising, Online Video, Viral Video, YouTube

20 Free Tips to Get Your Videos Seen on YouTube and Beyond

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It’s been a while since I’ve summarized some of the most important factors to getting your videos seen. This post is based on my own YouTube creator experience, my work with big brands, and my book (Beyond Viral). I’ve also written a free eBook called “How to Get Popular on YouTube Without Any Talent (version 2).”

Here it is:

How To Get Popular on YouTube (free eBook, version 2)

I’m sure I missed some current best practices so please add your own thoughts below!

1. Hook viewer in first 10 seconds (teasing highlights)
2. Keep it short. A one-minute video will almost always trump a 3.
3. Encourage interactions- get people commenting and, like Facebook, your YouTube video will rise higher. Controversial questions to viewers can jolt views.
4. Personalize it. Look at camera as if it’s a friend’s eyes and don’t assume your viewer knows you.
5. Include real laughter. Laughter induces laughter like yawns influence yawns. Get a sidekick who has a contagious laugh.
6. At the end, provide something unexpected or bedbug. See how you didn’t expect the word “bedbug” there?
7. Include animals. We humans like animals more than humans. Babies are clinchers too. Giggling baby with an animal? Golden.
8. Take the “road less travelled.” Sure, boobies get views but if you base your video on something already seen, your video is less likely to break through clutter. Show us something we’ve not seen (or rare to see) and people will share.
9. Real trumps script. Almost all of my top videos are not scripted bits but real, candid moments.
10. Appeal to heavy video viewers. Teenagers drive significant views, and even adolescents and Tweens (Annoying Orange). Test your video on this audience and note when they laugh or get bored.
11. Post regularly. The most popular and most-viewed YouTubers post daily or on a predictable schedule. Fresh outsells good.
12. Flow with current events. Selectively parody topical news or “Memes” and you’ll be topical and more relevant.
13. Take the title, tags and description very seriously so your video can be found easily on search engines like Google (and don’t think YouTube isn’t a search engine). You can even transcribe the video and add the text. Important terms: “how to,” “why does,” “who is,” “when is…”
14. Watch top creators for new ideas. For instance, most top web stars are providing thumbnails of other videos at the end of their video. This keeps a viewer from wandering off to “related videos.”
15. Post at right time. Stay away from weekends and Friday afternoon (when there’s a lot of viewing but heavy competition). Mornings are good and Tuesday is a heavy consumption day.
16. Someone once said a new blogger focuses on their blog, but a seasoned blogger is roaming. Likewise you want to appear in videos by people getting more views. The kind plug by PrankvsPrank for my recent “Itchy Butt” prank drove more views that from my base of 250K subscribers.
17. Chill out on “subscribers,” which is as meaningless as “likes” on Facebook. 100 fans are more valuable than 10,000 subscribers that accidentally subscribed from the stupid “box for box” feature (where if you subscribe to one channel you can passively subscribe to their friends.
18. Jump start views on other social-media channels like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Reddit (watch out for being seen as just tooting your own horn though).
19. Listen and talk back to your audience. When a creator acknowledges a viewer comment a bond is formed that is the lifeblood of a recurring audience.
20. Go for quantity not obsessive quality. I could never have predicted which of my 1000 videos would get tens of millions of views, and there’s a lot of power to trial and error. There’s almost an inverse relationship between the time I spend on a video and the views it gets.

Finally don’t judge success by total views alone. Whether you’re a marketer or entertainer, not all views are created equally. Focus on engagement, comments, view duration, and getting to the right audience. A niche show meeting an unmet need is going to work more effectively than trying to please broad audiences.

What did I miss? Obviously the most popular videos are those involving dancing, music, comedy, satire, politics, sex, babies and animals. Don’t underestimate the power of the thumbnail (image representing the video) too. But any general tips I missed?

Online Video

“Bed Intruder” Song Performed by Liberty University Choir

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Hide your kids. Hide your wife. News clip > autotune > choir > news

Liberty University’s Vision Ministries’ parodied the Gregory Brothers (shmoyoho) auto-tune spoof, “Bed Intruder,” last week (source: Liberty.edu). The performance were soon posted to YouTube by students, but after comments about poor audio, Liberty officials decided to post the university-filmed version of the song to Liberty’s YouTube channel.

The “Bed Intruder” was inspired by an interview with Antoine Dodson (see interview here) and the auto-tuned musical parody followed soon after (see here). Vision’s version is below and here.)

At 2:17 (two minutes and 17 seconds) in, the tempo picks up and the snapping and cheering commences.

Care to sing along? Lyrics below:

He’s climbin in your windows
He’s snatchin your people up
Tryna rape em so y’all need to
Hide your kids, Hide your wife
Hide your kids, Hide your wife
Hide your kids, Hide your wife
and hide your husband
Cuz they’re rapin errbody out here
You don’t have to come and confess
We’re lookin for you
We gon find you
We gon find you
So you can run and tell that,
Run and tell that
Run and tell that, homeboy
Home, home, homeboy
We got your t-shirt
You done left fingerprints and all
You are so dumb
Rou are really dumb–for real
The man got away leaving behind evidence
I was attacked by some idiot in the projects
So dumb, So dumb, So dumb, So
He’s climbin in your windows
He’s snatchin your people up
Tryna rape em so y’all need to
Hide your kids, Hide your wife
Hide your kids, Hide your wife
Hide your kids, Hide your wife
and hide your husband
Cuz they’re rapin errbody out here
You don’t have to come and confess
We’re lookin for you
We gon find you
We gon find you
So you can run and tell that,
Run and tell that
Run and tell that, homeboy
Home, home, homeboy

Online Video

I Wuv You (pig video)

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I love you. No I WUV you. It’s a rainy Friday morning. What else are you going to do? Make a hypnotic and overly cute pig video with your wife’s sqeeked voice. Duh.

Here’s the song “i wuv you” and you have complete rights to use it anyway you wish. Download it, and let me know what you do with it!

Now kids pay attention. This is a desperate attempt to manufacture viral, and comes with great risks. The goal was to squeeze as much cute into 52 seconds, but ensure I spent no more than 1 hour between concept and upload (and that’s counting the custom score). You know my rule… time spent on a video is inversely related to views (my Scary Maze, shot in 25 minutes, is at 23 million). At least I’m transparent.

Online Video

Viacom Loses Lawsuit Against YouTube. But Will Get You Next Time.

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Yeah Viacom lost that lawsuit against YouTube.

Says da judge: Because Google complies with any request from copyright holders to remove infringing content from YouTube it cannot be held liable itself for those infringements. Only in specific instances of failing to remove copyright-infringing content would YouTube be unable to claim safe harbour; mere knowledge of copyright infringement occurring on its service is not enough for YouTube to be culpable for that infringement.

Viacom executives had this to say (click for video).

Online Video

The Secret to YouTube Views and Subscribers: Poop Frequency

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Save yourself a lot of time, and ditch my eBook about how to get popular on YouTube. There’s one common denominator to getting regular YouTube views and subscribers. It’s a secret possessed by the regular names we see on YouTube’s most-popular videos of the day. People who retain wildly enthusiastic fans who watch, rate, favorite and forward videos. I once did it (more for my own discipline) and didn’t realize how vital it is.

Frequency. Routine. Post daily. Like you brush your teeth, exercise or poop.

It’s a simple thing, really. When my tagline was “Nalts makes a video everytime you poop,” each of my new videos was seen at least 40-50,000 times. Now I’m intermittent and people simply forget to look.

Sure you could argue that there are other factors. Not everyone that posts daily has views, and not everyone that gets loads of views posts daily. But it’s the single biggest common denominator, and therefore I proclaim it a “best practice.”

Take a look at the people that dominate the “most highly rated,” and tell me something they else have in common besides mostly vlogging and not sketch. They are (in no particular order): Shaytards (aka Shaytard), CTFxC (CharlesTrippy), SxePhil (Phillip DeFranco), WhatTheBuckShow (Michael Buckley), KassemG, Livealivalive, ShaneDawsonTV (and various other channels), CommunityChannel, FailBlog, MichelleFan, and a few more. I’m not hyperlinking their name, because you can find them all here sooner or later (most popular videos of the week on YouTube). There are videos that get more views, but these are the individuals that command a vivid audience.

It makes sense. It’s still a social media, and you can’t be very social if you’re out of mind. I don’t mean to marginalize the talent here. These are gifted people, and it’s not fair to write off their success to frequency. But I hold, as exhibit A, the fact that some of these people had more “packaged” content channels, and their daily vlog channels eclipsed their initial presence.

One exception among them: JimmyKimmelLive. Only 60K subscribers, but lots of recent views. Maybe one day Kimmel will grow up to be a YouTube star.

Online Video

Groove With the Funk of “Kutiman Thru-You”

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Thru You: Kutiman Mixes YouTube

Thru You: Kutiman Mixes YouTube

 

 

The Kutiman “Thru-You” funk! It’s “The Mother of All Funk Chords.” I wrote about it yesterday, and the Thru-You website still dead. But thanks to Jan for finding this delicious groove on YouTube.

It’s a mix of some soul-packed talent on YouTube, and it’s as creative as The Mystery Guitar Man’s “Impossible” (he’s the guy that wrote my original Nalts theme song). I hate to admit how I discovered it. You see, I was reading Marquisdejolie’s Twitter, and saw him reacting to ZeFrank. Surprised that ZeFrank is still alive, I found his Twitter… and he posted about this tune.

If your body doesn’t start to wiggle while you listen to this, you gotta lay off the Xanax.

Credits:

http://thru-you.com
Producer: http://www.youtube.com/user/kutiman

MiguelSi:, theremin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJIu7k…
TheHitman1990 (Bernard Purdie clip), drums:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FX_84…
MarloweDK, bass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl-CxM…
RockOnGoodPeople, funk guitar:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvw2Uu…
StringQuartet, gts-solo:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7IFYh…
Meewsic, blues harp and vocals:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NutUFs…
OriginalGuitarLesson (BJ Cunningham), rock guitar:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBS_6P…
Shellman1982, contrabass trombone:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXitAt…
ExpertVillage, trombone:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ged039…

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Rick Astley Makes Come Back With “Never Gonna Give You Up”

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Rick AstleyWarning: YouTube prank spoiler here. If you haven’t spent some time on YouTube’s homepage today, stop reading immediately.

If you have been there, you might have noticed that each of the attractive thumbnails take you to the same video. Rick Astley’s supah cheesy “Never Gonna Give You Up.” You’ve been “rickrolled.”

My hats off to the person that sold this internally. I’ve watched this video recently, and I’m quite sure I didn’t find it on my own. I wish I could remember where I found it. According to Wikipedia, Around the year 2007, posting mislabeled links to the video on the Internet became popular, in a prank known as “rickrolling.”

I can just hear the discussion at a YouTube “April’s Fool Brainstorming” meeting last week in San Bruno.

  • The prankster: So here’s my big idea. All these captivating homepage thumbnails, but every click goes to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
  • Stephen Chen: Who? Who’s Ricky Ashley?
  • Prankster: A 1980s star. When were you bor… never mind.
  • Editorial: That would give Astley an unfair advantage above other 1980s musicians trying to lift themselves out of oblivian. Like Weird Al. Then again, he’s big on Revver.
  • Tall, Balding Advertising Guy: It would give him millions and millions of views. Would we charge his agent a CPM or “per click”?
  • Community Lady: Who invited the bald guy with the bad breath? Anyway, I’m not sure people will get it. And they may get annoyed.
  • Advertising Guy: Wait, Goth Lady- can we host the video and take 100% of the advertising revenue? Like we’d just post it on a “house” partner’s account?
  • Stephen Chen: I don’t know. I’d rather go back to the original idea of putting the logo upside down. That smacks of comedic brilliance.
  • Mark Day: Righto, Stephen! That’s hysterical. Upside down logo. Steven Chen pees with Mark DayLOLLOLLLOLLLL. I can hear them now: “hey, is my computer upside down?” Can I walk you to your car. Mr. Chen? It looks like it’s raining again.
  • Stephen Chen: Yes, Smithers. Then it’s settled (he says dismissively, before leaving conference room with Mark Day by side).
  • Technical Guy: I liked your idea.
  • Prankster: Sighs. Well it would have been funny.
  • Technical Guy: Correction- it will be funny.
  • Prankster: Won’t Stephen get pissed?
  • Technical Guy: Nope. He hasn’t visited YouTube in 11 weeks. He’ll never know.
  • Stephen Chen (voice audible from hallway): Mark, I’d just assume you wait out here while I pee. I’m not sure I want the world knowing I drop my pants and undies below my knees when using the urinal.