AOL, BlipTV, Google, google video, metacafe, Online Video, Revver, Yahoo Video, YouTube

Best and Worst Site for Getting Your Videos Seen Fast

31 Comments

In my unscientific study I have identified the best and worst site for getting videos viewed quickly. This is based on my own experiments as well as feedback from some of you that have found this to be true as well.

Best site for getting views quickly: AOL Uncut (the consumer-generated portion of AOL). Example- something I uploaded 2 hours ago has more than 100 views. The exception to this would be when Metacafe, Yahoo, or Google feature you. Then your views rock.

Worst site for getting views: Eefoof (a company that shares ad revenue). Example- videos I uploaded a month ago have accumulated fewer than 10-20 views each.

Is this consistent with your findings? The winners for most-viewed appear to be (according to my videos):

  1. Metacafe (if your video is featured). I’m still making very decent money when they feature my videos. Dig the new logo.
  2. Google Video (slow and steady increases over time… a video never seems to die there)
  3. Yahoo Video (better than YouTube, and if they feature you your video can skyrocket- but that’s only happened to me twice)
  4. YouTube (really hard to get traffic there… 50-500 views seems about the average. Too much competition). I’ve had 250K views total at YouTube, but I’ve done much better on Google (million) and Yahoo (nearly million).
  5. Revver traffic is modest, but that’s because it’s up to the creators and affiates to get the video seen. Significant views don’t happen at Revver.com because it’s an infrequented website. All those EepyBird Mentos-Coke views occured on EepyBird via Revver. Not at Revver.com.

Remember that only four sites are paying (Revver, Metacafe, Eefoof, Blip and Lulu). I’ve had no luck with Eefoof and Lulu, but Blip should be “one to watch” if they embrace paying content creators.

Now we can only hope that our videos on Revver and Metacafe get as much traffic as the more trafficked sites.

31 thoughts on “Best and Worst Site for Getting Your Videos Seen Fast”

  1. I tried Matacafe, but it seems they don’t want my videos at their site at all. Only site that has made me feel rejected in the online video community.

  2. Snooty are they? Stuck up? Too self important? They only represent the elite? Only REAL artístes? No amatuers wanted? Private club? Don’t want our kind? Exclusive? A cut above? A site for discriminating taste? Pedigreed? Hoi polloi need not apply? Deliveries around back? No Tiffani bags of crap wanted? We’ll do lunch some time? See ya in the funny papers? Mon troppo non grata? Must wear tie? No smoking!? Yes, we have no bananas!?

    What makes you think they don’t want your videos on their site, Theo?

  3. There ARE several sites even worse than eefoof for views, but they’re not in the Hitwise top ten even if they ARE revenue sharing, so why bother? They stink.

    MySpace IS in the top ten but it sucks the big green weenie as far as views and uploading experience.

    Blip and Metacafe are the ones to watch. Especially if Revver decides to abdicate its throne visa vie the hubris of youth tunnelvision syndrome. But if Metacafe is going to dick around trying to be ifilm, I’ll suffer the pinpricks of Revver’s new software a few months longer.

  4. That is the down side of Metacafe. They’re selective like iFilm. But at least they pay out variable amounts (more that watch the more you get). iFilm/Break give you (unless I’m wrong) one flat fee and require exclusives if you want to be paid/featured.

    We need a site that shares like Revver but is popular as YouTube. What would be great is if one of the third-tier sites basically took Revver technology, focused on amateurs, and promoted the hell out of it. Operating costs would be very small. I run CubeBreak for $15 a month… I just don’t have the time to publicize and search-engine optimize it. So it’s far from a top 20 site…

  5. I too uploaded a load of clips to AOL this Sunday (where one of the most popular keywords that day was, apparently, Nalts…) and what I discovered was this – depending on time of day, your clip will sit as the ‘category’ thumbnail for, say, comedy, till someone else uploads. So rather than upload all you clips at once (and cannibalize your own exposure) only upload a clip when you’re no longer the “visible face of comedy” (say) on the ‘category’ page. Learn from my mistakes, people, because that top clip will get views…

  6. Seeing as how I don’t “sow my wild video-oats” on numerous sites, my results are a bit skewed. I have uploaded to Revver but due to technical difficulties and poor video content, I don’t get much traffic. In fact, I think I am ALL the traffic.

    Google Video on the other hand is, well, insane. I get more views on my damn METRA train video than my kid being funny.

    One word of warning though for those using Google Video (I speak from personal experience here). Turn OFF the comments feature when you upload. I’ve already been hit with crazy talk and spam. Rating are cool as it gives you an idea of how others like your video. But the comments are rough. And you can’t delete them. Or edit them.

  8. TK- thanks for the tip. I have barely gotten any comments on my videos on Google. Get lots on Metacafe and mostly they’re angry. The Yahoo ones were downright sweet.

    It’s weird how Google videos just grow and grow. I can’t figure out how people find them. P.S. Love the “sow video oats” comment. I’m going to steal that. And I know what you mean about being your only viewer. Sometimes I have to log into my YouTube aliases just to get my video 2-3 views. Shhhh.

  10. I just don’t like the idea of some 22 year-old who doesn’t know the difference between single malt and well drinks deciding if my stuff is good enough to enter the American psyche. Let me give you an example:

    When I was homeless living under the 405/ Manhattan Beach Blvd overpass near El Camino College, I used to go over to the college’s social sciences building and wait for classes to let out. When the kids started streaming out of the building, I stood atop a retaining wall and shouted at them: “SAVE YOUR MONEY ON THEM BOOKS AND SOCIOLOGY CLASSES. Study ME. I AM sociology!”

    I don’t reckon a 22 year-old would get that.

  11. I presume that your video description *is* your “keywords” on Google. And that as long as people search for whatever… you get hits. I get a little spike the day after Project Runway runs a new episode on TV, on Google (for my Project Runway spoofing clip) but the same clip seems to have done all it’s ever going to do on YouTube. Anyone figure out how to “search engine optimize” for Google yet?

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  13. Metacafe, my video has been on review forever and they rejeccted my other one.
    Yahoo, Says my video is live, but no one’s seeing it and I can’t find it when I search.
    Google, 153 views and 4 downloads, but I don’t know how they’re getting it.
    YouTube, A few views in a week.
    Revver and Magnify, where all my videos are, steadily makes a couple bucks a week (but I think it’s because some of my videos are on CubeBreak.com.

    Later this week I’m going to try all that bookmarking social networking stuff they mentioned in the Revver Forum. Kinda fun.

    But what I really need to do is make better videos…(I should say, more marketable videos)

  14. Mark- thanks for that reminder. Places a criticality in the words you use in your descriptions. I do a lot of SEO work for a living, so I’ll post on that.

    Marquis- Can you please reenact that socialogy bit? Do it twice- once with a tight shot of your face (no crowd needed) and the second time with a camera pointed at the kids faces… with you in the foreground but not blocking their reactions. Please, please, please? It’s a great story and I just have to see it.

    Aquadad- your stuff’s good. You need volume. Put yourself on a video-every-3-day quota. 😉

  15. If MetaSnoot is going to jack us around holding our videos “in review” for days or weeks treating us like pre-phone monopoly breakup AT&T customers, I say we jack them back. Dump ALL your stuff on them. Make practice videos and dump them on MetaSnoot. Convert your dad’s old raw 8 mm home video footage on them. What are they gonna do? Ban folks from even submitting?

    When I was in high school, the Baptist church I belonged to made the mistake of barring some black people from attending a church service I was attending. Up until that time, I had no awareness that I was in an exclusive club.

    So I quit being a Baptist right then and there, but that wasn’t satifying enough somehow. So my ex church’s lawn maintenance man began finding that no matter what he did, he could not get grass to grow in three certain patches right next to the church entrance. Strangely, the patches formed the numerals “666”…. until I joined the army.

  16. How much did you have to drink to spell three big numbers in pee? Did you ever get so drunk that you accidentally wrote 999?

  17. It took more than that…a gallon every 3 weeks of a certain hardware store industrial product. My sixes were six inches in lettering width and six by three feet tall. Nobody could drink that much.

  18. I don’t know about reenacting the sociology bit. I was half crazed from property owner-induced sleep depravation back then–as in: http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/15658052.htm

    Don’t know if I can recover that street-stained, tatter shirted, tumbleweed haired, flopfooted craziness that says “Let’s try to get arrested today to get a shower and a sack lunch in county lockup.”

    Besides, do they still teach sociology any more? Didn’t that go the way of small appliance repair and blacksmithing?

  19. Guys, guys, why so angry? Metacafe doesn’t censor content, nor does it hold items in review. Finally Metacafe doesn’t choose to ‘feature’ videos in its ‘best of the day’ section. All these things are done organically by the community.

    When you submit your video it gets distributed to a bunch of volunteer Metacafe users who have the client installed. Based on their approval, it will make it to the site and based on the rank it may or may not make it to the home page and be ‘featured’. If a video is being reviewed for too long it probably means that not enough users have bothered to review it which means that even among the people that volunteered to be reviewers not enough people were attracted by the title, description or thumbnail to even bother. It’s harsh, but it’s community policing at its most Web 2.0.

    Metacafe isn’t snobby about content. Metacafe’s users are.

  20. Another thought on AOL Uncut – if you posted 20 videos and basically pushed your own work off the top of the Comedy pile (for example…) go back and delete any clips that didn’t get quite as many views as you’d hoped. Then re-submit them, one at a time. If you hit a window of quiet submission time, your clip will be the categoy thumbnail for a few hours and hits will follow….

  24. I don’t think Metacafe users are snobby. I’d say they are the opposite. All you need is a 30 second video with a girl shaking her boobs and you get 5 stars. I say quit waisting time trying to create good content and just go find some jiggling breasts.

  25. Hee hee. Who said ‘content is king?’ With movies and videos it’s action, excitement and good ol’ brain (boobie)- stimulation to get hungry hordes downloading your videos!

  26. Hey guys, i came across a 3 months old video site named wewin.com. its a clean, easy to use, great site. u can watch videos and win prizes and also earn points for watching videos and can win prizes at the end of the month. its an awesome site. check it out

    http://www.wewin.com

  27. Crusing around google looking for sites where I can post my videos up for free other than the previous mentioned above, I found a pretty new site that’s up and coming (i think haha). It’s called http://www.urflick.com and it seems to be geared towards action-sports like snowboarding and skating which is pretty cool. I think you can win money or something for having the best action-sports video or having the hottest girl on a video haha. Check it out let me know what you think cuz I’m trying to decide where to post and place my loyalties haha =)

  28. Hey so I was cruising around Google looking for sites to post my videos up and found a site that’s not listed on here called http://www.urflick.com. Anybody know anything about this site? It looks like it’s directed toward snowboarding and stuff which is pretty cool. What interested me the most is their competition aspect to the site. Anyway, try and check it out and let me know what you think!

  30. In your blog entry, you state that the best site for getting views quickly is AOL Uncut. My response to you is: “You only think that because you are being lied to.” I posted part 1 of my video series to AOL Uncut, and in just a couple weeks, I had thousands of views. I posted part 2 of my video series, and again got thousands of views in just a couple weeks. Sounds great, right? However, something seemed fishy to me. My first video was getting between 190-210 views every day no matter what. All the other sites that I posted my videos to had large variation in views from day to day. For example, on Christmas Day, people were celebrating with their families, and not watching videos. So, on all the other sites that I have posted to, my videos got very few views that day. Not so for AOL Uncut! On that day, my first video got 200 views, about the same as any other day. So, I decided to do a little test with my third video. I included some counter HTML code to determine the actual number of views. Even though my 3rd video is by far my best effort, suddenly I’m only getting 150 views per WEEK! No 200 views per day for that video. Plus, about a week later, what do you know? Ninety days after I released my first video, AOL Uncut suddenly changed the total number of views on my first video from 6720 to 221. My second video also had its numbers similarly “revised” downward. It seems obvious to me that AOL Uncut was inflating its numbers in order to trick video producers into believing that AOL Uncut is the way to reach way more viewers than you can on YouTube or any other service. If this only happened on one of my videos, I might have thought this just a one-time bizzare technical glitch of some kind. The fact that this occured twice suggests to me that they are consciously implementing a system designed to trick video producers.

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