How to be a YouTube Success
Last week TechCrunch posted a piece entitled The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos which outlined nine rather dubious strategies marketers use to ensure any video reach at least 100,000 views. To see how people react to these practices see the comments or the follow up, or read some comments on Digg. I don't find find most the practices enraging because I've always known that the numbers mean nothing.
Say you achieve 100,000 hits, on the plus side that may translate to 10,000 actual views of your entire video. Depending on the content, that number gets knocked down significantly. So if you believe content is not king and your video sucks that 10,000 gets significantly knocked down, maybe 500 people watch the entire thing and hate you in the end. Then it's on to the next video, the previous three minutes of their life washed away by a waterskiing squirrel.
But if there is something there, a morsel of uniqueness, the view translates to a referral or a cross-post on a blog. This is truly when your video goes viral. People begin to promote and view your video for no other reason than the content, not because you tagged it "halo 3" or "fart." It finds its niche or target audience on its own. So while content is certainly not king on YouTube, simply the manipulation of data, a video's continuance of influence has everything to do with the content.
The bottom line is if you do want views you either have to cheat the system or find slower, much more respectable ways. For commercial ventures it seems "gaming" is the only viable option.
Example of how people "game" YouTube here, and also here.
I leave you with YouTube's all-time views leader.
