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Showing posts with label earnings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label earnings. Show all posts
Thursday, September 13, 2012
How to monetize royalty free music on Youtube videos
This official Youtube video demonstrates how to monetize a video that has royalty free music included in it and for which you have a license to use the music.
Bear in mind, Youtube's full policy for monetization can be found here. You must still comply with all Youtube's policies for monetization.
How to monetize Youtube gameplay videos
As a Youtube Partner who creates video game reviews on my channel The RPG Fanatic, I frequently get asked about whether making video game reviews are allowed to be monetized or not.
The above video explains Youtube's policy concerning video game footage and fair use. This is important information to know because unless you have permission from a developer to use gameplay footage in your videos, you must abide by Youtube's fair use policy for videogame footage.
Youtube's policy is very strict. They will not allow you to place ads on gameplay if there is no audio commentary tracks you have created yourself, and your commentary must provide educational or instructional value. This means you can't just upload video game trailers and expect to make money; Youtube won't allow you to do that.
Youtube also has an official video that demonstrates how to file a claim for videogame footage if you are invoking fair use,
For more information about fair use and DMCA on Youtube, please check the following links:
Using some copyrighted content in your video:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=143457
Youtube Video Monetization checklist:
http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2490020
Partner Help Center: Video Game and Software Content
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138161
Center for Social Media: Fair Use for Documentary & Online Video Makers
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use
Thursday, August 2, 2012
How to record video game footage for Youtube
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| The RPG Fanatic Show on Youtube |
This article will have all the advice I can give about the steps involved in video game review creation and how you too can make videos as good as The Angry Video Game Nerd.
How to record video game footage
For videogame console systems, I don't recommend using a video capture card for your PC unless you have a huge amount of Hard-drive space. For example, 10 Terabytes of space. And you need lots of RAM else there will be a huge delay between the gameplay and the commands you input using your controller.I would instead recommend getting an HD capture box, like this one made by Hauppauge.
There are a lot of free software for ripping images off a DVD. I personally use Handbrake as it has produced the best results for me.
For PC games, fraps is the only way to go.
Editing your video
Do not use something stupid like Windows Media Maker if you can help it. The final output always looks like garbage and it offers very limited editing tools, especially when it comes to audio.If you use a Windows based PC, I recommend the consumer (cheap) version of Sony Vegas. It's a great piece of software with some powerful audio functions.
However if you want to spend more money, get Premiere by purchasing the Adobe Creative Suite. One advantage to this is that you'll also get After Effects bundled with it, which can be used to make really great special effects for your live action segments.
I would recommend staying away from anything Avid. It's very pro software meant for high-end video editing, but the interface is so ridiculously non-intuitive you'd be better off not buying it unless you want to take film editing classes or have a friend show you how to use it.
Personally I use a Mac Pro for all my video editing, so I use Final Cut Pro. It's the only real choice. If you have a good Mac, get FCP or FCP X. Personally, I use an older version of FCP that I'm a lot more comfortable with but I've edited on FCP X too, and it's pretty user-friendly. If you've never done any video editing before it's very intuitive software.
If you are worried about how to edit a video and would like to learn some film theory, I recommend checking out any of these books about the topic.
What camera to use for recording live action segments
One thing I should point out is if you don't have a decent HD camera for recording live action segments, I recommend getting the Sony NEX-VG10 or the newer VG 20.
These cameras will give you a great picture and the built in audio mic is acceptable for product reviews (but not narratives! get a real mic and solid state audio recorder for that). Both cameras also come bundled with Sony Vegas, so you get both editing software and a great camera in one package.
However there are some cheaper cameras you can also get, though the picture quality won't be as amazing.
How to film your videos
Film-making is the art of painting with light. Even with a great camera, in order to produce really great shots you need to either purchase a professional 3 point light kit or go down to Lowe's / Home Depot / Walmart and get three shop lights.Regardless of which kind of lights you obtain, you should also buy some welding gloves because lights get insanely hot and you can easily scar yourself for life or burn your house down if you don't pay attention.
Recording good quality audio
Nothing ruins a great shot more than terrible sound quality.You can record your audio voice over for the game footage segments by plugging a mic into your computer BUT if you do record the audio separate from the footage using something like Garageband, then you'll need to record the audio at the appropriate frequency so it will match the frame rate of your video capture.
Recording audio voice overs at the wrong frequency screws a lot of novices up. Always capture video at either 30 (29.9) or 60 frames per second and your audio at 48.0 khz.
This is the only non-frustrating way to get the video and audio to perfectly sync up....I mean, if you did record audio at a different frequency it is possible to get something somewhat synced up by doing a lot of compressing, but it's never going to be perfect. Recording your audio and video at the correct settings will make your life a lot easier.
Also realize that the least frustrating way to record audio that will match your live action footage is to do all the audio recording on the built-in mic of your camera. However, note that a consumer brand camera (such as the NEX-VG10 I mentioned earlier) will have a feature called auto-gain which will greatly degrade the quality of the audio. Basically, any time there is a lull in your voice it will crank the gain way up because the camera assumes it should be hearing something but the noise is just too low. Auto-gain on cameras results in the sound levels going up and down constantly, which creates a lot of staticy noise.
However, for a Youtube product review this shouldn't be a major problem. If you use software like FCP or Vegas you can even apply audio filters that help compensate for autogain and get rid of the static.
Which video streaming service to use?
You have a lot of options here, because Youtube has many competitors like blip.tv, dailymotion and vimeo.However I would start out using Youtube. If you don't do any marketing of your video then you'll still be publishing content into the ethers, but far more people use Youtube to search for videos than any other service so you'll still get some traffic just from searches alone.
Now it is possible to drive traffic from Youtube to something else like blip.tv. This works by uploading a short 30-60 trailer for your episode onto Youtube and then including a link to your full episode on blip.tv in the video description of the Youtube trailer. However, you need a large fanbase on Youtube to make this tactic work. Only a small portion of your fans will take the extra time to travel from one video to yet another video to load. I'd focus on building a big fanbase before focusing on blip.tv. If you get a Partnership, Youtube ads pay much better anyway and all monetized videos automatically become promoted videos
You can also do things like plug your video as a Video Response to a more popular video. Just shop around different videos with similar subject matter, until you find someone who doesn't require approval for a video response to go public. Or you can ask the creator if they will approve your Video Response by sending them a PM through Youtube. Video Responses helps getting your content seen.
How to compress your video for Youtube
Your video editing suite should allow you to export your finished video in H.264 with the dimensions set to 1280 x 720 (this size is often referred to as '720P' ). There is no reason to upload at any other settings, as these are the settings Youtube will convert the video file to if it isn't uploaded that way already. So unless you want Youtube to compress your video and reduce it's quality, always upload at H.264 with the dimensions at 720P.How to determine keyword tags
For determining the keywords used in your video title, description and tag fields, use the Google Adwords Keyword ToolThis form will determine how often keywords related to your video subject are being searched, which will make your video appear in more results.
I should point out that new users have some advantage now because Youtube changed their algorithms to heavily favor new videos.
Setting up annotations
For how to setup your annotations (very important for Youtube), check out this video tutorial I've made. This video is a combination of advice I've received from other Partners and from Youtube Partner staff in private webinars.Conclusion
I hope this information answers your questions about how to record video game footage for Youtube and make product reviews of the games you play.Follow Carey on Google+
Monday, July 16, 2012
Why RPGFanatic.net and other community blog sites are great for Youtube Video SEO
This is going to sound a little like tooting my own horn but the strategy behind RPGFanatic.net is insanely great for Youtube Partners who make gaming content, and I really want to tell you why.
As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, Google made a lot of changes to the Google Search algorithms that have altered the landscape. The "freshness" of a website is now heavily factored into what web pages are displayed on the front page of the search results; that is, the more often a website makes new pages, the more likely that site is going to be having articles be displayed on the front page of the search results.
This is why community oriented sites where users have the ability to add content are fantastic for SEOing. On RPGFanatic.net you can have tons of people writing blogs every day and editing the wiki database. Once the site really kicks off with a few hundred daily users it is going to have a very high Page Rank and search engines will favor content related to it. I've already managed to get one of my articles on the front page of a Google Search listing for a game, so I know it is possible to make this work.
Another thing is that you can plug your personal blogs, Youtube channels and Facebook Fan Pages inside your blog posts, creating a backlink from Rpgfanatic.net to your own content. This has the effect of increasing your site's visibility in search engines!
If you want to get your content seen, all you need to do is embed your roleplaying videogame videos into our database and then plug those articles on other websites, such as forums, Squidoo articles and your own personal blogs. Share them on Facebook, reddit and Twitter! This has the effect of not just driving traffic to your videos but it improves the ranking of your content in search engines.
You will also be introducing more people to RPGFanatic.net who might start adding content of their own, which increases the "freshness" value of the website in Google, boosting the Google Search rank of ALL content that exists on the website!
And note that while there are other websites which allow you to submit your content to them, most of them have mods who discourage you from submitting monetized videos and will ban you for "spamming" if you embed your entire library of gaming videos. RPGFanatic.net will never ban users for adding legitimate content to our servers; we want you to be able to earn revenue from your game reviews, let's plays and walkthroughs!
We realize the more successful our users are, the more successful we will be.
Follow Carey on Google+
Monday, June 11, 2012
Improving AdSense Earnings on your websites
Most of my blog articles are focused on finding places online to drive traffic back to your Youtube videos, and many of these places are sites you can add AdSense code to, like tumblr and Blogger. However, AdSense earnings from blogs generally pay less than what we'd earn from Youtube videos.
I came across this great blog article that explains why website earnings from AdSense are often low, and what you can do to increase the earnings. There is a lot of factors involved, key among them is how many pages of content your website has and how many page impressions it averages in a day. These types of sites are considered by Adsense to be "high quality sites" and more expensive ads get placed on them.
I also found this blog article that talks about how AdSense will actually punish advertisers for placing ads on any websites it deems "low quality". This means AdSense doesn't differentiate much between whether my ads are on this blog or on my RPG videogame & wiki database, www.rpgfanatic.net/ ; if this blog has worse traffic than my RPG Fanatics website, then RPG Fanatics will have lower paying ads shown on it, too.
The phrase "Content is king" is thrown around a lot, but in this case it really does apply. If you want to make more money off AdSense for websites then you need to make consistent content for your websites, and a lot of it.
I came across this great blog article that explains why website earnings from AdSense are often low, and what you can do to increase the earnings. There is a lot of factors involved, key among them is how many pages of content your website has and how many page impressions it averages in a day. These types of sites are considered by Adsense to be "high quality sites" and more expensive ads get placed on them.
I also found this blog article that talks about how AdSense will actually punish advertisers for placing ads on any websites it deems "low quality". This means AdSense doesn't differentiate much between whether my ads are on this blog or on my RPG videogame & wiki database, www.rpgfanatic.net/ ; if this blog has worse traffic than my RPG Fanatics website, then RPG Fanatics will have lower paying ads shown on it, too.
The phrase "Content is king" is thrown around a lot, but in this case it really does apply. If you want to make more money off AdSense for websites then you need to make consistent content for your websites, and a lot of it.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Mylikes to make additional income from Youtube Videos?
Mylikes was originally launched in 2009 as Likeaholix. The website is aimed at helping users share content they like with others and get paid to do so. What brought Mylikes to my attention is their page titled "Make Money on Youtube" -- the service makes it easy to find advertisers and create sponsored videos for them.
I should say outright that I'm initially cautious of websites like Mylikes and it's not hard to find information to support my concerns. A Google Search for the website brought up this article that talks about the many problems with the site; namely that you might inadvertently be promoting a scam. That's obviously not good because promoting a scam would damage your reputation with your Youtube audience.
But I don't need to take that blog author's word for it. I can look at the 'Games' category and see there are several potential scams involving the sale of MMO gold,
There is a huge trust factor in building a fanbase and if your fans do not trust you then you cannot maintain them.
That said, there are several popular Youtube Partners who use the service so it cannot be all bad, right? At the least, if my channel is featured on their site it should improve the ranking of my Youtube channel in search engine results. So it is worth making an account just for that, but make sure you research the website or brand before you start promoting it.
As an example of how this works, here is one of the many sponsored Youtube video offers,
This offer is sponsored by Samsung to help promote one of their new phones. They want you to make a video response back to an advertisement video on their Youtube channel -- no doubt to improve the ranking of that video in search results and drive additional traffic to that video. The sponsored video is part of a contest but chances are people are not going to win it.
What we do want to pay attention to is the referral fee; the video is estimating that we'll get $21 per 1,000 video views our video response receives.
Here is another example,
This video is sponsored by Mylikes and pays $7 per 1,000 views. All you need to do is make a video declaring how great MyLikes is and encourage people to make an account on the service.
You can also use Mylikes to promote content via Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Here is an example of my RPG Fanatic Twitter account,
You might wonder how Mylikes determines that people have watched your video, and herein lies the issue with this. Mylikes will give you a code to insert into the description of your video and you only get paid when people actually click on that link,
That can actually be rather difficult to achieve. I know from having a link to my website on every video I have, tens of thousands of views a month only translates into a few hundred clicks back to my website from all my videos.
Still, if you have a large fanbases then you might profit exceptionally well from something like this. And there really is no way to know for certain what will happen if you don't try uploading some videos.
So this is what I will do: right now, I'm going to make a few sponsored videos and stick them on my channels. I'll see what happens and make another blog article revealing the results of my experiment.
I should say outright that I'm initially cautious of websites like Mylikes and it's not hard to find information to support my concerns. A Google Search for the website brought up this article that talks about the many problems with the site; namely that you might inadvertently be promoting a scam. That's obviously not good because promoting a scam would damage your reputation with your Youtube audience.
But I don't need to take that blog author's word for it. I can look at the 'Games' category and see there are several potential scams involving the sale of MMO gold,
There is a huge trust factor in building a fanbase and if your fans do not trust you then you cannot maintain them.
That said, there are several popular Youtube Partners who use the service so it cannot be all bad, right? At the least, if my channel is featured on their site it should improve the ranking of my Youtube channel in search engine results. So it is worth making an account just for that, but make sure you research the website or brand before you start promoting it.
As an example of how this works, here is one of the many sponsored Youtube video offers,
This offer is sponsored by Samsung to help promote one of their new phones. They want you to make a video response back to an advertisement video on their Youtube channel -- no doubt to improve the ranking of that video in search results and drive additional traffic to that video. The sponsored video is part of a contest but chances are people are not going to win it.
What we do want to pay attention to is the referral fee; the video is estimating that we'll get $21 per 1,000 video views our video response receives.
Here is another example,
This video is sponsored by Mylikes and pays $7 per 1,000 views. All you need to do is make a video declaring how great MyLikes is and encourage people to make an account on the service.
You can also use Mylikes to promote content via Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Here is an example of my RPG Fanatic Twitter account,
You might wonder how Mylikes determines that people have watched your video, and herein lies the issue with this. Mylikes will give you a code to insert into the description of your video and you only get paid when people actually click on that link,
That can actually be rather difficult to achieve. I know from having a link to my website on every video I have, tens of thousands of views a month only translates into a few hundred clicks back to my website from all my videos.
Still, if you have a large fanbases then you might profit exceptionally well from something like this. And there really is no way to know for certain what will happen if you don't try uploading some videos.
So this is what I will do: right now, I'm going to make a few sponsored videos and stick them on my channels. I'll see what happens and make another blog article revealing the results of my experiment.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Building a Squidoo Farm Is Not So Easy To Do
Squidoo is a blog publishing format similar to ehow.com, though instead of calling it an article they call it a 'lens'. I think the site was invented by hipsters.
I have read on various SEO blogs that building Squidoo farms back to your own website is a great tactic for increasing your PageRank, though the merits of doing so are debatable because Google (supposedly) doesn't rely very heavily on PageRank anymore.
At any result I noticed some people were writing game reviews on Squidoo and thought this would be an excellent place to embed my videos. I would build myself a 'Squidoo farm'-- a network of Squidoo lenses that would lead new audiences to my Youtube videos.
You might wonder what the value is in embedding your videos into blogs.
The answer is quite simple,
"It shouldn't be too hard," I thought. "I just need to copypasta my episode scripts and embed the video at the top, like I do with all my other blogs."
Oh how wrong I was.
The folks at Squidoo are not stupid and realized people might try something like this. Within a day after publishing my "lenses" they have an army of mining bots scour the internet looking for cases of plagiarism, which led them to the paragraphs of my blog I had stuck into some of my Youtube videos to fill it with juicy keywords, or my tumblr and blogger posts which I also include snippets of my script along with the embedded video, for the same reason I was making the Squidoo pages.
Squidoo's automated process locked several of my articles after noticing these "plagiarism" cases. While I was able to overturn them all eventually by sending a nice email to the Squidoo team explaining the writing belonged to me, it still took a week or two for the lock on the lens to be lifted. This obviously was slowing things down, so I thought I would try to rewrite some of my scripts, but even that wasn't enough. If I used so much as a sentence that was the same as in my Youtube videos, Squidoo would recognize it and lock my lens.
I ended up focusing on making lenses for older videos which I hadn't posted the scripts anywhere else before, but this also meant I can't post those script into any other blogs either else my lens will get locked down.
It's been a few weeks since I started doing this, and I haven't received that much traffic to my lenses (around 100 visits total since I started doing this last month). So much for that plan.
However, what I find interesting is that the majority of views are coming from Google searches. I've also received some traffic from sites like reddit. I know the Facebook traffic is coming from having plugged some pages on my personal Facebook wall and Fan Pages, but I can't explain the other traffic as anything but the result of other people sharing the lenses.
The Google searches are the really great thing though; there aren't many of them but getting any traffic from Google within a few weeks of making a page is pretty good. I'm actually getting more weekly Google Search traffic to my Squidoo lenses than I've been receiving to my blogger and tumblr blogs, and I've been doing those for years.
Even if the Squidoo farm doesn't lead to massive amounts of traffic, at the very least I can include some links back to my website in the lenses. This does help improve my website's PageRank.
I suppose I could try to SEO my lenses and make them get more traffic, but I would think doing the same to my own website would provide better results.
Perhaps my thinking is wrong on this? I guess time will tell.
To be honest I've had barely any traffic to my channel from my tumblr and blogger accounts, http://www.rpgvideoreviews.net/ and http://www.rpgvideoreviews.com . I have several other domains as well with keywords I want to associate with my channel, such as www.rpgs.mobi .
I actually have a number of parked domains which aren't being used at the moment because I'm unsure of the best way to use them. I ended up turning www.therpgfanatic.com into a redirect to my Youtube channel itself. I suppose I should talk about this domain stuff in a different blog article devoted to it?
I have read on various SEO blogs that building Squidoo farms back to your own website is a great tactic for increasing your PageRank, though the merits of doing so are debatable because Google (supposedly) doesn't rely very heavily on PageRank anymore.
At any result I noticed some people were writing game reviews on Squidoo and thought this would be an excellent place to embed my videos. I would build myself a 'Squidoo farm'-- a network of Squidoo lenses that would lead new audiences to my Youtube videos.
You might wonder what the value is in embedding your videos into blogs.
The answer is quite simple,
Search engines cannot data mine videos for text keywords.
Some don't even pay that much attention to the description section of a Youtube video. Blogs, however, can include a large number of text and sit on nice domains like blogger.com and squidoo.com, which have really high scores with the search engines.
"It shouldn't be too hard," I thought. "I just need to copypasta my episode scripts and embed the video at the top, like I do with all my other blogs."
Oh how wrong I was.
The folks at Squidoo are not stupid and realized people might try something like this. Within a day after publishing my "lenses" they have an army of mining bots scour the internet looking for cases of plagiarism, which led them to the paragraphs of my blog I had stuck into some of my Youtube videos to fill it with juicy keywords, or my tumblr and blogger posts which I also include snippets of my script along with the embedded video, for the same reason I was making the Squidoo pages.
Squidoo's automated process locked several of my articles after noticing these "plagiarism" cases. While I was able to overturn them all eventually by sending a nice email to the Squidoo team explaining the writing belonged to me, it still took a week or two for the lock on the lens to be lifted. This obviously was slowing things down, so I thought I would try to rewrite some of my scripts, but even that wasn't enough. If I used so much as a sentence that was the same as in my Youtube videos, Squidoo would recognize it and lock my lens.
I ended up focusing on making lenses for older videos which I hadn't posted the scripts anywhere else before, but this also meant I can't post those script into any other blogs either else my lens will get locked down.
It's been a few weeks since I started doing this, and I haven't received that much traffic to my lenses (around 100 visits total since I started doing this last month). So much for that plan.
However, what I find interesting is that the majority of views are coming from Google searches. I've also received some traffic from sites like reddit. I know the Facebook traffic is coming from having plugged some pages on my personal Facebook wall and Fan Pages, but I can't explain the other traffic as anything but the result of other people sharing the lenses.
The Google searches are the really great thing though; there aren't many of them but getting any traffic from Google within a few weeks of making a page is pretty good. I'm actually getting more weekly Google Search traffic to my Squidoo lenses than I've been receiving to my blogger and tumblr blogs, and I've been doing those for years.
Even if the Squidoo farm doesn't lead to massive amounts of traffic, at the very least I can include some links back to my website in the lenses. This does help improve my website's PageRank.
I suppose I could try to SEO my lenses and make them get more traffic, but I would think doing the same to my own website would provide better results.
Perhaps my thinking is wrong on this? I guess time will tell.
To be honest I've had barely any traffic to my channel from my tumblr and blogger accounts, http://www.rpgvideoreviews.net/ and http://www.rpgvideoreviews.com . I have several other domains as well with keywords I want to associate with my channel, such as www.rpgs.mobi .
I actually have a number of parked domains which aren't being used at the moment because I'm unsure of the best way to use them. I ended up turning www.therpgfanatic.com into a redirect to my Youtube channel itself. I suppose I should talk about this domain stuff in a different blog article devoted to it?
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Youtube Partner Click Bombing Survival Guide
The unfortunate drawback of being a Youtube Partner is that you inherit all of the risks that a conventional television celebrity would inherit without any of the financial advantages those celebrities have.
What "risk" am I talking about?
The chance that you might gain the attention of crazy people whose lives have so little meaning they need to obsess over trivial nonsense, to the point they wholeheartedly believe elaborate fantasies they have invented about themselves and decided to involve you in; otherwise known as 'stalkers'.
I was once click bombed and had my reputation digitally assassinated by a group of stalkers. This was a very traumatic experience for me because they were trying to not just drag my name through the mud but also take away my business' ability to earn revenue on Youtube.
Here is a video I created while I was going through the experience,
I'm telling you this upfront so you know two things; firstly, that I was click bombed and managed to keep my Adsense, and secondly that I understand every emotional thing someone who is being click bombed is going through.
This guide should help you retain your AdSense if you are being click bombed and if you haven't yet, it can still help you by explaining what click bombing is, why people do it and how you can detect it before it is too late.
Understanding the Motivations of Click-Bombers
There are some uneducated folks who will insist Youtube Partners who get click-bombed have done something to "deserve" the harassment. These arguments are incredibly misinformed about the psychology of the mentally unbalanced.
I mean, can you tell me what Jodie Foster did to convince John Hinckley, Jr to shoot President Reagan?
I'll tell you what she did; ABSOLUTELY <CENSORED> NOTHING!
However if you ask John Hinckley, Jr what she did he will weave you a fantastical tale of romance, adventure, and all kinds of other nonsense - all of which only ever existed inside his imagination!
Stalkers are a problem for everyone, but your probability of getting a stalker dramatically increases as awareness of 'you' increases. This is why celebrities get lots of stalkers, and Youtube Partners are no exception. If other people value what you say and you build a following -- even a modest one -- you can be certain that someone is going to demand your full attention simply because they believe if someone like you gives them attention they must be pretty important. Basically they want to leech off your popularity to make themselves feel special.
If you really get to the heart of it, stalkers are not at all interested in what the person they are stalking is doing. It is quite irrelevant to them. The stalker is focused entirely on themselves and what they can get out of the stalking, and that my friends is attention; and the worst is that the attention doesn't necessarily need to come from you.
The attention can come from other people, like angry members of your fanbase, law enforcement officials or even other stalkers with a like-mind.
I should stress the latter, because it is very relevant to what we will talk about here. Before everyone became super connected through the internet, stalkers were isolated from other stalkers. They were loners and the kinds of crazy stupid things they could do were fairly limited.
However, now because of places like Youtube, Facebook, Skype and 4chan, they can form tight-knit stalker communities without needing to leave their bedrooms. They form strong friendships with other stalkers and assist one another in their stalking activities, sharing information and tactics to obtain attention.
This is a significant problem and it's not being well addressed by places like Youtube and Facebook because there is so little information about these subcultures and how they function, even though the truth is they function much like any other kind of internet subculture; only instead of sharing images of funny cats they share people's home addresses and software for clickbombing Youtube Partners.
Harassing you simply becomes an activity shared by the group, fed by the elaborate fantasies they invent about what you have done to deserve their wrath in order to justify their actions. This new breed of internet troll does not necessarily harass people to gain attention from the target, but rather to be praised by the group for how much of a good troll they are.
Of course, feeding the trolls by giving them the attention they crave makes things worse.
So I know about this stuff because I was stalked last year. I had information about myself and my family posted all over the net, including phone numbers. Dozens of videos and blog articles from anonymous trolls were made accusing me of everything from being a child molester to a dishonorably discharged soldier, and none of it was true. They dislike bombed my videos and internet movie database listings. And it required a strong effort to get Youtube and other services they used to remove this material; even to this day some of it still exists.
You might think that when third parties come across their videos, forum posts and comments on my videos, it will be obvious the stalkers are trolling.... but that isn't always the case. Sometimes the trolling appears to be something else entirely and successfully deceives people. Rumors tend to be perpetrated by people who seek to obtain a measure of admiration from the person or group they are leaking information to., and some of these folk are not against fabricating information. Several individuals came out of the woodwork claiming to have some special insight or relationship with me in order to gain praise from the group for having shared the "information"; some of this shared "information" was a mixture of true information (stuff you could find in Google searches) and lies.
For example, my Youtube page listed my location as San Antonio, TX and I had mentioned in videos that I was a disabled Veteran. An individual suddenly appeared who made a series of videos claiming that he knew me from my active duty days and he met me when I was stationed at Fort Sam Houston, which is located in San Antonio, TX.
The truth is that I have never in my entire life been inside Fort Sam Houston; I had only recently moved to San Antonio, TX. Everything this individual said about me was a complete lie, based on what little information he had gathered about me from my Youtube page. But it was enough to convince several people in the stalker community that what he said was true, and they spread his lies in their own videos and blog posts about me. And he gained a lot of praise from his fellow stalkers for his actions.
You can find more information about the tactics internet stalkers use to harass their victims by reading the book Digital Assassination: Protecting Your Reputation, Brand, or Business Against Online Attacks
I spent months trying to do damage control and ensure I also posted wherever they were spreading lies, explaining the truth so that others who stumble across the posts in Google search results for my name don't get the wrong idea. However, it was like chopping heads off a hydra; responding to one forum post simply resulted in several more popping up and soon there was a feeding frenzy as several troll communities banded together to milk whatever attention they might get out of cyber stalking me. Pretty much every blog I own was attacked, including my Facebook fan page which forced me to disable any of my fans from posting to it for a week.
I knew that giving them attention would not make things better, but I felt I had no other choices. Unlike some who are stalked I did not have a large fanbase to drown out the lies. If someone posts an insult on a Madonna video you will find at least a few dozen die-hard Madonna fans quickly respond to defend Madonna and legions more will click the 'Dislike' and 'Spam' buttons on the comment to make it hidden. This is not the case for someone like me who has a very small fanbase for my show.
However, the harassment only quieted down once two things occurred,
1) I started ignoring the trolls completely. I also disabled ratings on my videos so they could no longer dislike bomb them, and made posting comments to my videos and blogs approval only. This deprived them of ways to get attention from others by harassing me, since nobody could see their harassment.
Depriving them of ways to spam my videos infuriated them initially, but they eventually got bored and stopped trying to spam my videos.
2) Their group imploded on itself. This shouldn't surprise anyone; there is no honor among thieves and the same goes for the mentally disturbed psychopaths who get their kicks by harassing people on the internet. Eventually they started turning on one another, using the secrets everyone shared about themselves to harass the weaker members of their group who were now a much easier target than I was.
(If you are wondering why I know so much about this, it is because I was sent a Skype chat log from the stalker group which detailed the whole shebang from their point of view. Like any good soldier, I studied it. After all, if you want to defeat your enemy you must first understand your enemy).
My assessment of the situation is that the stalkers turned to click bombing as a final resort in order to demonstrate to the target and each another that they have power and influence. The click bombings occurred after their months of 'Report this video' flag-bombing and Google forum posts did not result in the loss of my Partner account, and I began completing ignoring them. So they turned to click bombing to "teach me a lesson" and the lesson I was supposed to learn is that they have power over me.
I imagine this is the same motivation for all click bombers; to demonstrate they have power and are important.
When their actions failed to revoke my Partnership they became frustrated at each other and the group fell apart on its own due to the internal conflicts.
Anyway, there is a lot of information out there for website owners on how to respond to a click bombing but pretty much nothing for Youtube Partners. This blog article is designed to change that. I survived a clickbombing and while I cannot say this will work for everyone, I can tell you this is what worked for me.
Defend Yourself!
My primary occupational specialty in the United States Army was 11B; that's Infantry. I can tell you that the absolute worst situation you could ever find yourself in as foot soldier is one where you cannot go on the offensive and all you can do is hold a position, defending yourself against wave upon wave of attack.
This is because the enemy has all of the advantages; they can attack you whenever they want and from whatever direction they want. They can bolster their forces with reserves, whereas your forces are surrounded. And because you are trying to hold a position the only resources you have are those with you in the position, whereas the enemy can keep supplying their forces with more and more resources.
And this is true in many other things, including publishing content on the internet.
The unfortunate thing about click-bombings is that you cannot "attack" the click bombers, and you cannot "recruit" anyone to help you defend against the click-bombings. You also have very limited means to defend yourself due to lack of information on what they are doing, such as what videos they are targeting. This is because AdSense doesn't tell you what videos earned what clicks, and Analytics is very slow to update this information.
Step 1) Monitor Your AdSense Like a Hawk
All you can do is defend against their attacks and hold your position, but unlike real-life you cannot hear a gunshot or explosion to alert you to the attack happening. Click-bombings are silent attacks and there is only ONE place you can even see that they are taking place.
Your AdSense account.
I will repeat this for emphasis: The ONLY place you can see that a clickbombing is happening is from your AdSense.
Youtube Analytics WILL NOT tell you it is taking place. This is because Analytics does not update in real time and often has a delay of 2-4 days before it has actually made anything resembling a realistic earning statement, let alone an accurate view count. AdSense, on the other hand, is updated in real time.
By the time Analytics finally updates your account may already be shut down.
Everyone who uses AdSense should religiously monitor their AdSense account; and I am not exaggerating this.. You must catch it happening within the first few hours or your AdSense might be shut down by Google's automatic algorithms for detecting invalid click activity.
I check my Adsense several times a day as a force of habit whenever I check my email.
If you are a Partner through another network (like Machinima for example) there is no way for you to know if you are being click bombed and hopefully someone at that service will be looking out for this stuff.
For everyone else who has their own AdSense connected to their Youtube account, this is what a clickbombing in progress looks like when it first begins,
This is a screenshot I took of the first clickbombing attack that happened to me. I caught it within 2 hours of the attack's start (I know this because I had checked my AdSense an earlier, and then on a whim checked it again before going to bed. Plus the screenshot clearly says I last logged in two hours prior). I snapped this screenshot as soon as I recognized what it was.
For those unfamiliar with AdSense I will explain what you are seeing in the photo, and I have circled the only important information to us concerning click bombings (my earnings and other personal information has also been deleted as displaying that would violate the AdSense terms of service agreement).
'Hosted AdSense for Content' is the label AdSense uses for Youtube earnings. I don't know why they don't make it more obvious, but that is what it is.
'Page views' is the number of times an ad was displayed on your Youtube videos.
'Clicks' is the number of times someone clicked on an ad.
'Page CTR' is the click through ratio of your videos. Generally speaking you should never see a Page CTR that is higher than 15%. Anything more than that is incredibly suspicious because the overwhelming majority of people DO NOT click on ads. Whenever you see large numbers of clicks on ads, you are most likely being click bombed (This is something even advertisers should be aware of, so they can realize when they are being ripped off by ad display networks).
You will notice in the above screenshot my Page CTR was about 37%. So you might think to yourself, "Oh, your Page CTR was not that high. It's just 37%. You were just over-reacting."
This is the screenshot I took when I refreshed the page,
The Page CTR is now 68.78%. Still think I was over-reacting? I hope not.
Anyway AdSense eventually started trying to fix the damage, and dropped the earnings. I can't show you how much it was but at certain points it was saying I had earned over a thousand dollars. Had I been paid those earnings the advertisers would have been very upset because they had been ripped off, and that is ultimately what the click bombers do; they try to make it look like the Youtube Partner is having their ads click bombed.
Why would a stalker want to do this? It's because Google assumes the only people who might be benefited from click bombings are the owner of the channel, so they have an algorithm that will disable your AdSense if it detects a large amount of click activity. The account remains disabled until a live person at Google investigates it. The problem is it can take weeks, even months, for anyone to ever respond to you.
Meanwhile you will lose your Youtube Partnership because in order for an account to retain 'Partner' status it MUST be associated with an AdSense account. Even worse, some Partners who have had their Adsense disabled have attempted to make a new AdSense account and connect their account to it, but Google has a policy that says an individual may only have one AdSense account and making additional accounts will result in the termination of all accounts, so eventually those Adsense accounts get detected and closed. Eventually the Youtube Partnership is lost.
Essentially, click bombers use Google's own policies against Youtube Partners they wish to harass by tricking the algorithms into shutting the account down.
Step 2) File an Invalid Click Report and Email Youtube Partner Support!
The only way to defend against them is to monitor your AdSense for suspicious activity and file an invalid click report with AdSense as soon as you notice something is wrong.
This must be done from the AdSense account that is affected. Include as much information as possible. Feel free to even file several dozen emails, to make sure someone sees it!
Additionally, I submitted an email to Youtube Partner support which included screenshots of the invalid click activity and the following message,
I received the following reply,
The important thing is that someone at Youtube Partner Support might have forwarded my email to someone else who handles invalid click activity at AdSense.
Even if that didn't happen, I now have a record that I promptly and correctly reported the invalid click activity was occurring to several parties at Google
This is important because if I did have my Partnership shut down I would be able to use this email in efforts to convince someone at Google that I was responsible in monitoring my AdSense click activity and should have it restored. This is a big deal because I have no record of my invalid click activity submissions, because Google does not send you a copy of the report you submit nor any email indication that they received it.
It is not enough to simply do one or two things when defending against something like this. You must use all possible resources at your disposal and take action to help yourself in the worst case scenario, which is having your Partnership revoked.
By emailing Partner Support ahead of time, you make it easier for the decision to be appealed and your Partnership re-instated should that occur.
Step 3) Disable ALL Ads on EVERY Video!
Having said all of this, you need to physically disable ads on every video you have put up. This is because the option to disable ads on all videos on your account does absolutely nothing.
I don't care what the text says. It is broken. It does NOT stop displaying ads on your videos. Ads continue to be displayed and they keep clicking away. After toggling ads off using that box, I waited for TWO HOURS for the ads to stop being displayed and ads CONTINUED until I literally went into each and every video and disabled the ads manually.
You must go into EVERY video you have monetized and uncheck ALL the boxes for ads. If you are like me and have hundreds of videos on all your accounts, this can take over an hour to do and is incredibly tedious.
But it is the ONLY way to make the clickbombings STOP.
I did not want to shut off my ads. I actually waited several days for AdSense or Youtube Partner support to respond, and in the meantime I left ads on my videos and kept submitting invalid click reports. I never heard anything back from AdSense about this matter. The click-bombings only stopped when I shut off my ads, because the trolls got bored or thought they had won.
I then left ads off my accounts for two weeks to ensure I got off the radar of the stalkers, so they could feel like they "won" and find something else to do.
Unfortunately this means the only way to protect yourself is to lose money. That sucks.
I wish I had better advice to give you, but Youtube has been very unhelpful in assisting Partners with this problem. Sure, my account wasn't disabled but had they communicated with me and re-assured me my account would not be disabled, I would have been a lot less stressful for that entire period of time. I also got little to no assistance from other Partners, as they had no experience with the matter or wanted to chime in about how it must be my fault and I deserve it.
Nobody who is click bombed "deserves it". Click-bombing is a malicious scam that is easily performed by anyone. All it requires is any software designed to enhance your mouse so you spam several clicks with just one mouse click, and use software that makes it appear that you have multiple IP addresses. It requires no actual technical skills to perform.
Someone who has never used a computer could be taught to do it in five minutes, it is that easy.
I could post the method here but I do not want to assist anyone who is seeking to do it. But it is a childishly easy thing to perform and Google should be embarrassed that their ad display network is vulnerable to it and that their own policies designed to protect advertising clients are actually hurting the people who make Youtube profitable -- the Partners.
I hope this guide is useful to you.
Follow Carey on Google+
What "risk" am I talking about?
The chance that you might gain the attention of crazy people whose lives have so little meaning they need to obsess over trivial nonsense, to the point they wholeheartedly believe elaborate fantasies they have invented about themselves and decided to involve you in; otherwise known as 'stalkers'.
I was once click bombed and had my reputation digitally assassinated by a group of stalkers. This was a very traumatic experience for me because they were trying to not just drag my name through the mud but also take away my business' ability to earn revenue on Youtube.
Here is a video I created while I was going through the experience,
I'm telling you this upfront so you know two things; firstly, that I was click bombed and managed to keep my Adsense, and secondly that I understand every emotional thing someone who is being click bombed is going through.
This guide should help you retain your AdSense if you are being click bombed and if you haven't yet, it can still help you by explaining what click bombing is, why people do it and how you can detect it before it is too late.
Understanding the Motivations of Click-Bombers
There are some uneducated folks who will insist Youtube Partners who get click-bombed have done something to "deserve" the harassment. These arguments are incredibly misinformed about the psychology of the mentally unbalanced.
I mean, can you tell me what Jodie Foster did to convince John Hinckley, Jr to shoot President Reagan?
I'll tell you what she did; ABSOLUTELY <CENSORED> NOTHING!
However if you ask John Hinckley, Jr what she did he will weave you a fantastical tale of romance, adventure, and all kinds of other nonsense - all of which only ever existed inside his imagination!
Stalkers are a problem for everyone, but your probability of getting a stalker dramatically increases as awareness of 'you' increases. This is why celebrities get lots of stalkers, and Youtube Partners are no exception. If other people value what you say and you build a following -- even a modest one -- you can be certain that someone is going to demand your full attention simply because they believe if someone like you gives them attention they must be pretty important. Basically they want to leech off your popularity to make themselves feel special.
If you really get to the heart of it, stalkers are not at all interested in what the person they are stalking is doing. It is quite irrelevant to them. The stalker is focused entirely on themselves and what they can get out of the stalking, and that my friends is attention; and the worst is that the attention doesn't necessarily need to come from you.
The attention can come from other people, like angry members of your fanbase, law enforcement officials or even other stalkers with a like-mind.
I should stress the latter, because it is very relevant to what we will talk about here. Before everyone became super connected through the internet, stalkers were isolated from other stalkers. They were loners and the kinds of crazy stupid things they could do were fairly limited.
However, now because of places like Youtube, Facebook, Skype and 4chan, they can form tight-knit stalker communities without needing to leave their bedrooms. They form strong friendships with other stalkers and assist one another in their stalking activities, sharing information and tactics to obtain attention.
This is a significant problem and it's not being well addressed by places like Youtube and Facebook because there is so little information about these subcultures and how they function, even though the truth is they function much like any other kind of internet subculture; only instead of sharing images of funny cats they share people's home addresses and software for clickbombing Youtube Partners.
Harassing you simply becomes an activity shared by the group, fed by the elaborate fantasies they invent about what you have done to deserve their wrath in order to justify their actions. This new breed of internet troll does not necessarily harass people to gain attention from the target, but rather to be praised by the group for how much of a good troll they are.
Of course, feeding the trolls by giving them the attention they crave makes things worse.
So I know about this stuff because I was stalked last year. I had information about myself and my family posted all over the net, including phone numbers. Dozens of videos and blog articles from anonymous trolls were made accusing me of everything from being a child molester to a dishonorably discharged soldier, and none of it was true. They dislike bombed my videos and internet movie database listings. And it required a strong effort to get Youtube and other services they used to remove this material; even to this day some of it still exists.
You might think that when third parties come across their videos, forum posts and comments on my videos, it will be obvious the stalkers are trolling.... but that isn't always the case. Sometimes the trolling appears to be something else entirely and successfully deceives people. Rumors tend to be perpetrated by people who seek to obtain a measure of admiration from the person or group they are leaking information to., and some of these folk are not against fabricating information. Several individuals came out of the woodwork claiming to have some special insight or relationship with me in order to gain praise from the group for having shared the "information"; some of this shared "information" was a mixture of true information (stuff you could find in Google searches) and lies.
For example, my Youtube page listed my location as San Antonio, TX and I had mentioned in videos that I was a disabled Veteran. An individual suddenly appeared who made a series of videos claiming that he knew me from my active duty days and he met me when I was stationed at Fort Sam Houston, which is located in San Antonio, TX.
The truth is that I have never in my entire life been inside Fort Sam Houston; I had only recently moved to San Antonio, TX. Everything this individual said about me was a complete lie, based on what little information he had gathered about me from my Youtube page. But it was enough to convince several people in the stalker community that what he said was true, and they spread his lies in their own videos and blog posts about me. And he gained a lot of praise from his fellow stalkers for his actions.
You can find more information about the tactics internet stalkers use to harass their victims by reading the book Digital Assassination: Protecting Your Reputation, Brand, or Business Against Online Attacks
.
I knew that giving them attention would not make things better, but I felt I had no other choices. Unlike some who are stalked I did not have a large fanbase to drown out the lies. If someone posts an insult on a Madonna video you will find at least a few dozen die-hard Madonna fans quickly respond to defend Madonna and legions more will click the 'Dislike' and 'Spam' buttons on the comment to make it hidden. This is not the case for someone like me who has a very small fanbase for my show.
However, the harassment only quieted down once two things occurred,
1) I started ignoring the trolls completely. I also disabled ratings on my videos so they could no longer dislike bomb them, and made posting comments to my videos and blogs approval only. This deprived them of ways to get attention from others by harassing me, since nobody could see their harassment.
Depriving them of ways to spam my videos infuriated them initially, but they eventually got bored and stopped trying to spam my videos.
2) Their group imploded on itself. This shouldn't surprise anyone; there is no honor among thieves and the same goes for the mentally disturbed psychopaths who get their kicks by harassing people on the internet. Eventually they started turning on one another, using the secrets everyone shared about themselves to harass the weaker members of their group who were now a much easier target than I was.
(If you are wondering why I know so much about this, it is because I was sent a Skype chat log from the stalker group which detailed the whole shebang from their point of view. Like any good soldier, I studied it. After all, if you want to defeat your enemy you must first understand your enemy).
My assessment of the situation is that the stalkers turned to click bombing as a final resort in order to demonstrate to the target and each another that they have power and influence. The click bombings occurred after their months of 'Report this video' flag-bombing and Google forum posts did not result in the loss of my Partner account, and I began completing ignoring them. So they turned to click bombing to "teach me a lesson" and the lesson I was supposed to learn is that they have power over me.
I imagine this is the same motivation for all click bombers; to demonstrate they have power and are important.
When their actions failed to revoke my Partnership they became frustrated at each other and the group fell apart on its own due to the internal conflicts.
Anyway, there is a lot of information out there for website owners on how to respond to a click bombing but pretty much nothing for Youtube Partners. This blog article is designed to change that. I survived a clickbombing and while I cannot say this will work for everyone, I can tell you this is what worked for me.
Defend Yourself!
My primary occupational specialty in the United States Army was 11B; that's Infantry. I can tell you that the absolute worst situation you could ever find yourself in as foot soldier is one where you cannot go on the offensive and all you can do is hold a position, defending yourself against wave upon wave of attack.
This is because the enemy has all of the advantages; they can attack you whenever they want and from whatever direction they want. They can bolster their forces with reserves, whereas your forces are surrounded. And because you are trying to hold a position the only resources you have are those with you in the position, whereas the enemy can keep supplying their forces with more and more resources.
And this is true in many other things, including publishing content on the internet.
The unfortunate thing about click-bombings is that you cannot "attack" the click bombers, and you cannot "recruit" anyone to help you defend against the click-bombings. You also have very limited means to defend yourself due to lack of information on what they are doing, such as what videos they are targeting. This is because AdSense doesn't tell you what videos earned what clicks, and Analytics is very slow to update this information.
Step 1) Monitor Your AdSense Like a Hawk
All you can do is defend against their attacks and hold your position, but unlike real-life you cannot hear a gunshot or explosion to alert you to the attack happening. Click-bombings are silent attacks and there is only ONE place you can even see that they are taking place.
Your AdSense account.
I will repeat this for emphasis: The ONLY place you can see that a clickbombing is happening is from your AdSense.
Youtube Analytics WILL NOT tell you it is taking place. This is because Analytics does not update in real time and often has a delay of 2-4 days before it has actually made anything resembling a realistic earning statement, let alone an accurate view count. AdSense, on the other hand, is updated in real time.
By the time Analytics finally updates your account may already be shut down.
Everyone who uses AdSense should religiously monitor their AdSense account; and I am not exaggerating this.. You must catch it happening within the first few hours or your AdSense might be shut down by Google's automatic algorithms for detecting invalid click activity.
I check my Adsense several times a day as a force of habit whenever I check my email.
If you are a Partner through another network (like Machinima for example) there is no way for you to know if you are being click bombed and hopefully someone at that service will be looking out for this stuff.
For everyone else who has their own AdSense connected to their Youtube account, this is what a clickbombing in progress looks like when it first begins,
This is a screenshot I took of the first clickbombing attack that happened to me. I caught it within 2 hours of the attack's start (I know this because I had checked my AdSense an earlier, and then on a whim checked it again before going to bed. Plus the screenshot clearly says I last logged in two hours prior). I snapped this screenshot as soon as I recognized what it was.
For those unfamiliar with AdSense I will explain what you are seeing in the photo, and I have circled the only important information to us concerning click bombings (my earnings and other personal information has also been deleted as displaying that would violate the AdSense terms of service agreement).
'Hosted AdSense for Content' is the label AdSense uses for Youtube earnings. I don't know why they don't make it more obvious, but that is what it is.
'Page views' is the number of times an ad was displayed on your Youtube videos.
'Clicks' is the number of times someone clicked on an ad.
'Page CTR' is the click through ratio of your videos. Generally speaking you should never see a Page CTR that is higher than 15%. Anything more than that is incredibly suspicious because the overwhelming majority of people DO NOT click on ads. Whenever you see large numbers of clicks on ads, you are most likely being click bombed (This is something even advertisers should be aware of, so they can realize when they are being ripped off by ad display networks).
You will notice in the above screenshot my Page CTR was about 37%. So you might think to yourself, "Oh, your Page CTR was not that high. It's just 37%. You were just over-reacting."
This is the screenshot I took when I refreshed the page,
The Page CTR is now 68.78%. Still think I was over-reacting? I hope not.
(I actually have the entire Skype log of the group who was doing this click bombing to my channel. It was sent to me a few months later when the group fell apart due to internal drama between the members, and basically they all started turning on one another. The log detailed about six months of harassment and included the organizing and execution of the click bombing attacks, and the dates of the log matched the activity in my records.)
Anyway AdSense eventually started trying to fix the damage, and dropped the earnings. I can't show you how much it was but at certain points it was saying I had earned over a thousand dollars. Had I been paid those earnings the advertisers would have been very upset because they had been ripped off, and that is ultimately what the click bombers do; they try to make it look like the Youtube Partner is having their ads click bombed.
Why would a stalker want to do this? It's because Google assumes the only people who might be benefited from click bombings are the owner of the channel, so they have an algorithm that will disable your AdSense if it detects a large amount of click activity. The account remains disabled until a live person at Google investigates it. The problem is it can take weeks, even months, for anyone to ever respond to you.
Meanwhile you will lose your Youtube Partnership because in order for an account to retain 'Partner' status it MUST be associated with an AdSense account. Even worse, some Partners who have had their Adsense disabled have attempted to make a new AdSense account and connect their account to it, but Google has a policy that says an individual may only have one AdSense account and making additional accounts will result in the termination of all accounts, so eventually those Adsense accounts get detected and closed. Eventually the Youtube Partnership is lost.
Essentially, click bombers use Google's own policies against Youtube Partners they wish to harass by tricking the algorithms into shutting the account down.
Step 2) File an Invalid Click Report and Email Youtube Partner Support!
The only way to defend against them is to monitor your AdSense for suspicious activity and file an invalid click report with AdSense as soon as you notice something is wrong.
This must be done from the AdSense account that is affected. Include as much information as possible. Feel free to even file several dozen emails, to make sure someone sees it!
Additionally, I submitted an email to Youtube Partner support which included screenshots of the invalid click activity and the following message,
"To whom it may concern,
I am being click bombed, as these screenshots demonstrate. Picture 7 shows that I have attempted to disable ads on my videos yet ads are still showing and the click bombing is continuing. I own the Youtube Partner channels jfreedan, TheRPGFanatic and NinjaGKaiser. As the clicks are independent of views, I don't know what channel is being attacked.
I hope you will not disable my Partner accounts, as I have done everything I possibly can do to prevent this aside from deleting my channels.
Carey Martell
Managing Member, Martell Brothers Studios, LLC"
I received the following reply,
"Thank you for emailing YouTube Partner Support.
You can find an answer to your question at the following Partner Support resources.
- Find educational materials and chances to connect with the creator community at the YouTube Creator Hub: http://www.youtube.com/creators/
- Interact with and get answers to your questions from other Partners and YouTube experts at the YouTube Partner Forum: http://goo.gl/oeT6
- Search for step-by-step guidance and platform/feature information in the YouTube Partner Help Center: http://goo.gl/EW893
- Stay up-to-date with known site issues at the YouTube Known Issues Page:http://goo.gl/MRSJ
You can also sign up for our product and program-related email communications from within your YouTube account by following these instructions: http://goo.gl/GvTRr.
Thanks,
The YouTube Partner Support TeamThis is obviously a worthless form letter that provided me with no useful information, but that is beside the point.
The important thing is that someone at Youtube Partner Support might have forwarded my email to someone else who handles invalid click activity at AdSense.
Even if that didn't happen, I now have a record that I promptly and correctly reported the invalid click activity was occurring to several parties at Google
This is important because if I did have my Partnership shut down I would be able to use this email in efforts to convince someone at Google that I was responsible in monitoring my AdSense click activity and should have it restored. This is a big deal because I have no record of my invalid click activity submissions, because Google does not send you a copy of the report you submit nor any email indication that they received it.
It is not enough to simply do one or two things when defending against something like this. You must use all possible resources at your disposal and take action to help yourself in the worst case scenario, which is having your Partnership revoked.
By emailing Partner Support ahead of time, you make it easier for the decision to be appealed and your Partnership re-instated should that occur.
Step 3) Disable ALL Ads on EVERY Video!
Having said all of this, you need to physically disable ads on every video you have put up. This is because the option to disable ads on all videos on your account does absolutely nothing.
I don't care what the text says. It is broken. It does NOT stop displaying ads on your videos. Ads continue to be displayed and they keep clicking away. After toggling ads off using that box, I waited for TWO HOURS for the ads to stop being displayed and ads CONTINUED until I literally went into each and every video and disabled the ads manually.
You must go into EVERY video you have monetized and uncheck ALL the boxes for ads. If you are like me and have hundreds of videos on all your accounts, this can take over an hour to do and is incredibly tedious.
But it is the ONLY way to make the clickbombings STOP.
Do this to ALL videos you have!
I then left ads off my accounts for two weeks to ensure I got off the radar of the stalkers, so they could feel like they "won" and find something else to do.
Unfortunately this means the only way to protect yourself is to lose money. That sucks.
I wish I had better advice to give you, but Youtube has been very unhelpful in assisting Partners with this problem. Sure, my account wasn't disabled but had they communicated with me and re-assured me my account would not be disabled, I would have been a lot less stressful for that entire period of time. I also got little to no assistance from other Partners, as they had no experience with the matter or wanted to chime in about how it must be my fault and I deserve it.
Nobody who is click bombed "deserves it". Click-bombing is a malicious scam that is easily performed by anyone. All it requires is any software designed to enhance your mouse so you spam several clicks with just one mouse click, and use software that makes it appear that you have multiple IP addresses. It requires no actual technical skills to perform.
Someone who has never used a computer could be taught to do it in five minutes, it is that easy.
I could post the method here but I do not want to assist anyone who is seeking to do it. But it is a childishly easy thing to perform and Google should be embarrassed that their ad display network is vulnerable to it and that their own policies designed to protect advertising clients are actually hurting the people who make Youtube profitable -- the Partners.
I hope this guide is useful to you.
Follow Carey on Google+
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Competent Advice for Youtube Partners Who Want More Views
I am not a psychologist. I feel I should put this disclaimer at the start so folks don't get the wrong impression.
I am not a psychologist but I am interested in the subject. I took a class in it during high school, and I've tried to keep up with journals and whatnot, but lately I haven't had much time with all this Youtube stuff to focus on.
Anyway there is a psychological model written by Noel Burch called, 'Four stages of competence'. It's something that has stuck with me for a long time and I'd like to share it with you, because I think it is very relevant to what I'm going to talk about today.
As posted on Wikipedia,
I believe that if I keep at it I can eventually advance to the higher stages but only if I'm willing to keep putting myself out there.
Here is the thing though; I think, for our purposes of discussion, #3 and #4 should be switched. Conscious competence should be ranked higher than unconscious competence.
Here is why.
There are many highly successful Youtube Partners who give the same tired advice, usually in some kind of webinar or video blog which is promoted on Youtube Creator space. It usually goes like this.
-Post videos every day on some kind of schedule. (Even though many big Partners are like The Angry Video Game Nerd, who only ever released two videos a month at their most productive period and has often missed a release date. Constantly releasing a stream of content on a steady schedule might be helpful but can't be necessary for success, because not every big Partner does it. )
-Share it on Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else (even though only a small portion of people you know will share your videos, and among their friends even less will share it-- and you might get banned from forums for sharing your own videos)
-Buy ads (even though it isn't cost effective to do so)
-Put annotations in your videos (even though only a small portion of users will even see them, let alone click on them).
-Engage with your audience and respond to comments and PMs (which I have always done and while it helps maintain subscribers it doesn't really help you recruit new viewers)
So why do the big Partners give this kind of advice when these things don't actually do much to improve your views?
My thinking is that these Partners are unconsciously competent. They know what they do to maintain their subscribers and build from them, but they don't actually know how to gain a lot of views and subscribers because other than make the videos that went viral, they weren't directly part of the marketing process that developed their fanbase.
They are people like HDCYT. If 'Charlie Bit My Finger' had never been posted onto CollegeHumor.com then we probably wouldn't be talking about it right now. It'd be just one more home movie someone randomly posted onto Youtube to share with a relative.
For many big Youtubers, they got super lucky with the related video algorithms, which made it very easy to gain awareness. The honest truth is that regardless of what you made, so long as it was slightly interesting and had relevant keywords in the title and description, it would get promoted on youtube in the Related Videos feed. I experienced this myself with my videos during 2007-2009.
The "quality" of the videos had very little to do with it, and I think still has little to do with it. I think people who tell you to make "quality" videos are incredibly misinformed about what is required to make a video go viral; "quality" is a highly subjective thing.
What isn't subjective is posting a video onto the front page of a website that has 100k+ views a day and telling people to go look at it, or assembling an army of people with vast social network reach to plug videos for you. That stuff works.
Don't believe me? This video has 60k views and it is paint drying! Why does it have so many views? Because someone paid a marketing firm to get it 60k views by plugging it into vast personal social networks of the marketing firm's employees.
Advice #1 : Cross-promote with other Partners
The people who become successful on Youtube in recent years are doing so because they are tapping into audiences outside of Youtube, or someone with an already established Youtube audience is pimping them.
But even with a plug from a Youtube superstar you are not guaranteed to get that many views; for example, my interview with egoraptor was pimped on his Youtube feed, his Facebook Fan page and his Twitter and it still only has 17,045 views as of this writing.
egoraptor has about five hundred thousand subscribers, and his videos get over a million views each within a few days of uploading. So what is the problem? Why doesn't my video that he pimped get even a few hundred thousand views?
Well, I don't know for sure, but here is my best guess:
...and JonTron has egoraptor in his recommended channel list on his feed and front page.
Egoraptor also has JonTron in his recommended channel list, too.
The top Partners who are consciously competent at using Youtube realize networking with other Partners is the best way to expand awareness of their videos. You can't just upload videos into the vast sea of Youtube and hope they float to the top of the charts. You have to market them, and networking with other partners who have audiences similar to the ones you want to attract can be a very effective way to expand.
Here is another thing to consider.
Let's say that I am a big Youtube Partner who makes videogame reviews, but only about roleplaying games (not too much of a stretch, I guess?).
The people who search for my content using Youtube's search bar and who see my videos in Related Video feeds are most likely doing a search relevant to the particular game that I uploaded a review for. For example, I might have a review for Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and people might come across my channel while doing a search for "Final Fantasy Mystic Quest", but if they are searching for something like Minecraft or The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, my videos will never come up because I have no reviews for those games.
That means the overwhelming majority of people who search for videogame related content are never going to see my videos, because they aren't searching for the specific reviews I've uploaded. And just because I put generic keywords like "rpgs" and "video game" into my description and tag area doesn't mean jack! That isn't enough to make my videos appear in generic search results for "rpgs" or "videogames"-- not when millions of millions of other videos are also using those same tags.
There are legions of people who would be interested in my videos but they will never find my videos by doing a search, unless they are specifically looking for one of my videos.
So what do you do if you want to tap into audiences on Youtube who might be interested in your content?
Answer: You network with someone else who has a fanbase similar to the one you want or already have, and you share audiences by helping plug one another.
And not just once, or twice, or merely sticking them into your "recommended channels" sidebar to gather dust.
You need to constantly be liking, favoriting and commenting on their videos so that they get seen in the subscription feeds of users--- and they must do the same thing for you!
After all, many Youtube users are subscribed to hundreds of channels -- many of whom post several vblogs a day. There is A LOT of stuff that goes into your subscription feed that you never see unless you sit on Youtube all day long (and even then....but we'll get to that later).
You also need to expand your plugging efforts outside of Youtube. You have to promote one another on your Twitter and Facebook Fan pages, too.
Here is an example, again using egoraptor's Facebook Fan Page.
If you expand the image you'll see egoraptor has plugged one of Nathan Barnatt's videos.
Then if you look at Nathan Barnatt's channel....
...you clearly see egoraptor sitting in his recommended channels listing.
It's not a coincidence. It's marketing and it's obviously highly effective.
Here is one thing that some people get short-sighted about: You don't need to only network with big channels.
As an example, I have 2,793 subs on my 'jfreedan' channel, and 1,639 on TheRPGFanatic channel. My friend 8-Bit Eric has 2,513 on his channel. If Eric and I both like, favorite and comment on our mutual friend Wootstick's latest video using our channels, that is potentially 6,945 people who might view Wootstick's video.
Imagine if Eric and I each have 20k subscribers on our channels. That's 40k potential views we could drive to Wootstick just from our own subscriber bases alone.
Now, I must point out that these numbers are the best possible outcome; it's the potential views.
Realistically each plug you do may only get 20%-40% of the potential views obtainable -- which is why you continually like, favorite and comment on each other's videos! Eventually you will get a very high portion of the subscribers of one channel to have gone and seen the videos on everyone else's channel.
This is not a brand new tactic. Way back when the internet was young and "Bert Is Evil" memes were all the rage, we called this forming a 'web ring'. Everyone would embed links into our website leading to other websites who were part of the group, and we often had banner exchanges that rotated each member's banner every time someone loaded the page. Our news pages would have links to something that had been posted to another person's website. Webcomics still promote each other this way, and that is relevant because just like videos, a webcomic primarily consists of content that cannot be crawled by search engines.
The problem is this: when trying to network you come across a lot of people who aren't committed to the cause. They put you into their recommended channel space, do a little bit of promotion, and then forget to do it later on. Sometimes they even watch your videos and don't comment, favorite or like them, because, "I forgot".
They have a million excuses for why they can't keep the promotion up, ranging from, "I don't want to upset my subscribers" to "I am too busy with school".
Then there are the people who don't want to make a Facebook Fan page, even though it's the MOST effective way to ensure your subscribers see your latest videos (the subscriber feed has too much spam and shows only 'highlights' by default, not everything).
Look at that bullshit. Yes, I'm going to curse here. THAT.IS.BULLSHIT!
Most of your Youtube subs are not seeing your content. They are seeing 'highlights', which are determined by some stupid algorithm. I don't know what that stupid algorithm is using as criteria, but I have all three of my Partner channels subscribed to one another and I do not always see my latest videos appear. That should tell you something.
If I didn't have a Facebook Fan Page I would have no views. The very first thing I do is plug my video into my Facebook Fan Page and the first people I see comment on the video are people who belong to my Facebook Fan page. I am hardly an expert here but I think I know enough to say that if you don't have a Facebook Fan page and want to be successful on Youtube, then you are not trying hard enough. There is no excuse to not have one, they are completely free and easy to manage.
However, even Facebook implemented 'highlights' filters to pages, so not even that is sacred anymore. And just like Youtube it does NOT save your settings.
Facebook isn't only limited to your Fan Page though; you can form super secret groups with all the members of your network. If you want a video promoted, post it into the group so all the other members can retweet / favorite / whatever the video. Facebook groups make it EASY to find the content you want others in your network to promote, because trying to keep tabs on everyone's subscription feed on Youtube is an enormous waste of time given how much content is posted these days (and the new 'highlights' filter nonsense).
Another thing to consider is that if you help build up someone who doesn't have a lot of views you are ultimately helping create a new audience for your own work.
Does that sound weird? Let me explain.
Let's suppose I have 500 of my subscribers become followers of Wootstick's channel. Of those 500, about 50 of them actually share all of Wootstick's videos on their Facebook pages. Of those 50 about 10 more people check out Wootstick's page and subscribe. A handful of them actually share some of Wootstick's videos on a big forum like one at The Escapist, bringing Wootstick several hundred more subscribers.
All these new subscribers from The Escapist who came to look at Wootstick's videos probably have never heard of my content before-- but they will as Wootstick plugs my video in his Youtube, Twitter and Facebook feeds.
So there is actually a lot of benefit to people with larger fanbases to help small channels grow. A lot of people just get tunnel vision and want to go the quick and easy route of getting someone like egoraptor to pimp their stuff constantly.
Now you might say to yourself, "You don't have a lot of views. Why are you telling me to do this? How do you know for sure it will work?"
The answer is simple: I don't know for sure it will work. It hasn't so far. I'm simply looking at what the top Youtube Partners are doing and noticing that it is working well for them, since they often get hundreds of thousands of views more than the number of people subscribed to their channels
However, my network is also very small. My new website is the hub for my network and as of this writing the new website has existed for a whopping month. And I have only recruited a few individuals into my network because I'm being selective. I'm recruiting featured contributors who have been making videos for awhile, who have been doing it on a somewhat religious basis, and that I believe will mesh well with the other contributors in the network.
So we haven't had much time to see results yet, but I am confident that view counts will increase for all members in the coming months, so long as everyone is committed to the cause.
What I do know for sure is that this is one strategy I have not tried yet and I think it is going to be the one that is most effective.
Do you have any experience trying this networking thing out on Youtube? Leave a comment and let me know!
Advice #2 : Embed your videos into blogs
Youtube Search sucks. It really, really does.
And Google Search doesn't display many Youtube videos anymore, instead just a handful of high traffic ones it has deemed "relevant".
If you want your Youtube videos to be discovered by people using search engines you need to embed your videos into blogs and make those blogs filled with content rich keywords.
Here is an example of one of my blogs, my RPG Video Reviews blog on Tumblr. A quick look will show you that I also include a good portion of the video scripts in my blog article so that search engines will pick up on the blog.
Another thing I do is use websites like Squidoo to create a "farm" of articles with my videos embedded into them. Because sites like Squidoo have very high PageRanks, search engines like Google Search will occasionally display your articles and introduce people to your video content in that way.
When you get into writing blogs you need to research how to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) them. I've written a little about that process, so if you're interested check one of my other articles.
These two pieces of advice-- networking with other Partners and embedding your videos into blogs-- are the only two things which have brought me any real results. Every other tactic I've tried has not been so successful.
I hope you've gotten something out of this.
I am not a psychologist but I am interested in the subject. I took a class in it during high school, and I've tried to keep up with journals and whatnot, but lately I haven't had much time with all this Youtube stuff to focus on.
Anyway there is a psychological model written by Noel Burch called, 'Four stages of competence'. It's something that has stuck with me for a long time and I'd like to share it with you, because I think it is very relevant to what I'm going to talk about today.
As posted on Wikipedia,
The four stages
- Unconscious incompetence
- The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.
- Conscious incompetence
- Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.
- Conscious competence
- The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.
- Unconscious competence
- The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
I believe that if I keep at it I can eventually advance to the higher stages but only if I'm willing to keep putting myself out there.
Here is the thing though; I think, for our purposes of discussion, #3 and #4 should be switched. Conscious competence should be ranked higher than unconscious competence.
Here is why.
There are many highly successful Youtube Partners who give the same tired advice, usually in some kind of webinar or video blog which is promoted on Youtube Creator space. It usually goes like this.
-Post videos every day on some kind of schedule. (Even though many big Partners are like The Angry Video Game Nerd, who only ever released two videos a month at their most productive period and has often missed a release date. Constantly releasing a stream of content on a steady schedule might be helpful but can't be necessary for success, because not every big Partner does it. )
-Share it on Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else (even though only a small portion of people you know will share your videos, and among their friends even less will share it-- and you might get banned from forums for sharing your own videos)
-Buy ads (even though it isn't cost effective to do so)
-Put annotations in your videos (even though only a small portion of users will even see them, let alone click on them).
-Engage with your audience and respond to comments and PMs (which I have always done and while it helps maintain subscribers it doesn't really help you recruit new viewers)
So why do the big Partners give this kind of advice when these things don't actually do much to improve your views?
My thinking is that these Partners are unconsciously competent. They know what they do to maintain their subscribers and build from them, but they don't actually know how to gain a lot of views and subscribers because other than make the videos that went viral, they weren't directly part of the marketing process that developed their fanbase.
They are people like HDCYT. If 'Charlie Bit My Finger' had never been posted onto CollegeHumor.com then we probably wouldn't be talking about it right now. It'd be just one more home movie someone randomly posted onto Youtube to share with a relative.
For many big Youtubers, they got super lucky with the related video algorithms, which made it very easy to gain awareness. The honest truth is that regardless of what you made, so long as it was slightly interesting and had relevant keywords in the title and description, it would get promoted on youtube in the Related Videos feed. I experienced this myself with my videos during 2007-2009.
The "quality" of the videos had very little to do with it, and I think still has little to do with it. I think people who tell you to make "quality" videos are incredibly misinformed about what is required to make a video go viral; "quality" is a highly subjective thing.
What isn't subjective is posting a video onto the front page of a website that has 100k+ views a day and telling people to go look at it, or assembling an army of people with vast social network reach to plug videos for you. That stuff works.
Don't believe me? This video has 60k views and it is paint drying! Why does it have so many views? Because someone paid a marketing firm to get it 60k views by plugging it into vast personal social networks of the marketing firm's employees.
Advice #1 : Cross-promote with other Partners
The people who become successful on Youtube in recent years are doing so because they are tapping into audiences outside of Youtube, or someone with an already established Youtube audience is pimping them.
But even with a plug from a Youtube superstar you are not guaranteed to get that many views; for example, my interview with egoraptor was pimped on his Youtube feed, his Facebook Fan page and his Twitter and it still only has 17,045 views as of this writing.
egoraptor has about five hundred thousand subscribers, and his videos get over a million views each within a few days of uploading. So what is the problem? Why doesn't my video that he pimped get even a few hundred thousand views?
Well, I don't know for sure, but here is my best guess:
Today I noticed egoraptor favorited a JonTron video......
...and JonTron has egoraptor in his recommended channel list on his feed and front page.
Egoraptor also has JonTron in his recommended channel list, too.
The top Partners who are consciously competent at using Youtube realize networking with other Partners is the best way to expand awareness of their videos. You can't just upload videos into the vast sea of Youtube and hope they float to the top of the charts. You have to market them, and networking with other partners who have audiences similar to the ones you want to attract can be a very effective way to expand.
Here is another thing to consider.
Let's say that I am a big Youtube Partner who makes videogame reviews, but only about roleplaying games (not too much of a stretch, I guess?).
The people who search for my content using Youtube's search bar and who see my videos in Related Video feeds are most likely doing a search relevant to the particular game that I uploaded a review for. For example, I might have a review for Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and people might come across my channel while doing a search for "Final Fantasy Mystic Quest", but if they are searching for something like Minecraft or The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, my videos will never come up because I have no reviews for those games.
That means the overwhelming majority of people who search for videogame related content are never going to see my videos, because they aren't searching for the specific reviews I've uploaded. And just because I put generic keywords like "rpgs" and "video game" into my description and tag area doesn't mean jack! That isn't enough to make my videos appear in generic search results for "rpgs" or "videogames"-- not when millions of millions of other videos are also using those same tags.
There are legions of people who would be interested in my videos but they will never find my videos by doing a search, unless they are specifically looking for one of my videos.
So what do you do if you want to tap into audiences on Youtube who might be interested in your content?
Answer: You network with someone else who has a fanbase similar to the one you want or already have, and you share audiences by helping plug one another.
And not just once, or twice, or merely sticking them into your "recommended channels" sidebar to gather dust.
You need to constantly be liking, favoriting and commenting on their videos so that they get seen in the subscription feeds of users--- and they must do the same thing for you!
After all, many Youtube users are subscribed to hundreds of channels -- many of whom post several vblogs a day. There is A LOT of stuff that goes into your subscription feed that you never see unless you sit on Youtube all day long (and even then....but we'll get to that later).
You also need to expand your plugging efforts outside of Youtube. You have to promote one another on your Twitter and Facebook Fan pages, too.
Here is an example, again using egoraptor's Facebook Fan Page.
If you expand the image you'll see egoraptor has plugged one of Nathan Barnatt's videos.
Then if you look at Nathan Barnatt's channel....
...you clearly see egoraptor sitting in his recommended channels listing.
It's not a coincidence. It's marketing and it's obviously highly effective.
Here is one thing that some people get short-sighted about: You don't need to only network with big channels.
As an example, I have 2,793 subs on my 'jfreedan' channel, and 1,639 on TheRPGFanatic channel. My friend 8-Bit Eric has 2,513 on his channel. If Eric and I both like, favorite and comment on our mutual friend Wootstick's latest video using our channels, that is potentially 6,945 people who might view Wootstick's video.
Imagine if Eric and I each have 20k subscribers on our channels. That's 40k potential views we could drive to Wootstick just from our own subscriber bases alone.
Now, I must point out that these numbers are the best possible outcome; it's the potential views.
Realistically each plug you do may only get 20%-40% of the potential views obtainable -- which is why you continually like, favorite and comment on each other's videos! Eventually you will get a very high portion of the subscribers of one channel to have gone and seen the videos on everyone else's channel.
This is not a brand new tactic. Way back when the internet was young and "Bert Is Evil" memes were all the rage, we called this forming a 'web ring'. Everyone would embed links into our website leading to other websites who were part of the group, and we often had banner exchanges that rotated each member's banner every time someone loaded the page. Our news pages would have links to something that had been posted to another person's website. Webcomics still promote each other this way, and that is relevant because just like videos, a webcomic primarily consists of content that cannot be crawled by search engines.
The problem is this: when trying to network you come across a lot of people who aren't committed to the cause. They put you into their recommended channel space, do a little bit of promotion, and then forget to do it later on. Sometimes they even watch your videos and don't comment, favorite or like them, because, "I forgot".
They have a million excuses for why they can't keep the promotion up, ranging from, "I don't want to upset my subscribers" to "I am too busy with school".
Then there are the people who don't want to make a Facebook Fan page, even though it's the MOST effective way to ensure your subscribers see your latest videos (the subscriber feed has too much spam and shows only 'highlights' by default, not everything).
Look at that bullshit. Yes, I'm going to curse here. THAT.IS.BULLSHIT!
Most of your Youtube subs are not seeing your content. They are seeing 'highlights', which are determined by some stupid algorithm. I don't know what that stupid algorithm is using as criteria, but I have all three of my Partner channels subscribed to one another and I do not always see my latest videos appear. That should tell you something.
If I didn't have a Facebook Fan Page I would have no views. The very first thing I do is plug my video into my Facebook Fan Page and the first people I see comment on the video are people who belong to my Facebook Fan page. I am hardly an expert here but I think I know enough to say that if you don't have a Facebook Fan page and want to be successful on Youtube, then you are not trying hard enough. There is no excuse to not have one, they are completely free and easy to manage.
However, even Facebook implemented 'highlights' filters to pages, so not even that is sacred anymore. And just like Youtube it does NOT save your settings.
Facebook isn't only limited to your Fan Page though; you can form super secret groups with all the members of your network. If you want a video promoted, post it into the group so all the other members can retweet / favorite / whatever the video. Facebook groups make it EASY to find the content you want others in your network to promote, because trying to keep tabs on everyone's subscription feed on Youtube is an enormous waste of time given how much content is posted these days (and the new 'highlights' filter nonsense).
Another thing to consider is that if you help build up someone who doesn't have a lot of views you are ultimately helping create a new audience for your own work.
Does that sound weird? Let me explain.
Let's suppose I have 500 of my subscribers become followers of Wootstick's channel. Of those 500, about 50 of them actually share all of Wootstick's videos on their Facebook pages. Of those 50 about 10 more people check out Wootstick's page and subscribe. A handful of them actually share some of Wootstick's videos on a big forum like one at The Escapist, bringing Wootstick several hundred more subscribers.
All these new subscribers from The Escapist who came to look at Wootstick's videos probably have never heard of my content before-- but they will as Wootstick plugs my video in his Youtube, Twitter and Facebook feeds.
So there is actually a lot of benefit to people with larger fanbases to help small channels grow. A lot of people just get tunnel vision and want to go the quick and easy route of getting someone like egoraptor to pimp their stuff constantly.
Now you might say to yourself, "You don't have a lot of views. Why are you telling me to do this? How do you know for sure it will work?"
The answer is simple: I don't know for sure it will work. It hasn't so far. I'm simply looking at what the top Youtube Partners are doing and noticing that it is working well for them, since they often get hundreds of thousands of views more than the number of people subscribed to their channels
However, my network is also very small. My new website is the hub for my network and as of this writing the new website has existed for a whopping month. And I have only recruited a few individuals into my network because I'm being selective. I'm recruiting featured contributors who have been making videos for awhile, who have been doing it on a somewhat religious basis, and that I believe will mesh well with the other contributors in the network.
So we haven't had much time to see results yet, but I am confident that view counts will increase for all members in the coming months, so long as everyone is committed to the cause.
What I do know for sure is that this is one strategy I have not tried yet and I think it is going to be the one that is most effective.
Do you have any experience trying this networking thing out on Youtube? Leave a comment and let me know!
Advice #2 : Embed your videos into blogs
Youtube Search sucks. It really, really does.
And Google Search doesn't display many Youtube videos anymore, instead just a handful of high traffic ones it has deemed "relevant".
If you want your Youtube videos to be discovered by people using search engines you need to embed your videos into blogs and make those blogs filled with content rich keywords.
Here is an example of one of my blogs, my RPG Video Reviews blog on Tumblr. A quick look will show you that I also include a good portion of the video scripts in my blog article so that search engines will pick up on the blog.
Another thing I do is use websites like Squidoo to create a "farm" of articles with my videos embedded into them. Because sites like Squidoo have very high PageRanks, search engines like Google Search will occasionally display your articles and introduce people to your video content in that way.
When you get into writing blogs you need to research how to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) them. I've written a little about that process, so if you're interested check one of my other articles.
These two pieces of advice-- networking with other Partners and embedding your videos into blogs-- are the only two things which have brought me any real results. Every other tactic I've tried has not been so successful.
I hope you've gotten something out of this.
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