We kick off this week with a great story that not only makes YouTube a serious contender for the “bigger is dumber” award but also carries some great lessons for the “little guy” of video on YouTube and other services.
Last year YouTube decided they had way too much money sitting around the office and needed to get rid of it fast.
The idea was to pump around $300 million into various Original YouTube Channels in an effort to get them scaled up faster than they would without the additional funding.
Sounds OK so far but the catch was that each channel had to repay the money first before they could fully benefit from the fruits of their labor.
The results were fairly mixed as you would expect with some rising to the occasion, others being too burdened by the weight of the debt to get anywhere and some going nowhere despite the funding.
One of the projects that recieved the funding was Vlogbrothers and you can read one of the Vlogborothers take on the entire episode here at:
- Lessons Learned from YouTube’s $300M Hole
Another analysis and well worth the read is from ReelSEO and you can see that post here:
- YouTube Original Channels: Vlogbrother Shares Lessons Learned
For me the real lesson to be learned by the rest of us who may not actually have access to funding like this is the fact that what you may think is successful in your online videos may be based on what you have observed as being successful on television.
What has emerged is that online video stands or falls according to new set of rules that is being defined and re-defined as we go along and that the most heartening point is that slick production values do not rate highly in what the public enjoy in online video.
A few years ago the sensible advice on what camcorder to buy or what camera to buy always followed the same rule.
If you want to take photos, get a camera, if you want to take videos, get a camcorder. Camcorders were designed to take video and their still taking abilities were a sort of mediocre add-on. Cameras were designed to take photos and any videos they captured were largely useless because of terrible quality.
Well these days that has all changed and although the camcorders till hold their ground in terms of taking good video there is no denying that the new breed of video equipped still cameras are on a par with them and in many cases are better.
In light of that simply scouting around video sites is no longer the only way to find good tutorials on video techniques.
This next article from PhotoFocus provides some great tips for getting good results with DSLR captured video.
As far as I am concerned you can never have too many tips, tricks and tutorials on building your audience on YouTube!
It may not be a jungle “out there” but it certainly is on YouTube and Vimeo with literally thousands and thousands of other people vying for attention.
This is a great post on the YouTube Blog outlining a strategy for identifying your audience and then catering to them in an effort to expand that audience through further engagement.
And just to keep things balanced here and give (almost) equal air time, an announcement from Vimeo outlining their enhanced abilities to deliver to the mobile market.
So far this week you may be thinking it’s all online video and not much more… and you would probably be right!
Here’s why:
- We Now Watch 6 Billion Hours of Content A Month on YouTube
“Earthlings now watch YouTube to the tune of 6 billion hours a month. That’s a 50 percent increase year-over-year. And, they are citing a conclusion from Nielsen that YouTube reaches more people in the 18-34 demographic than any cable network. That’s some kind of reach.”
And finally for this week just to satisfy the geeks among you or the inner geek for you non-geeks some of the most notable tech trends that came out of the NAB 3013 Events recently:
This weeks resources:
ReelSEO on G+
Hank Green
http://photofocus.com
YouTube G+
Vimeo
Studio Daily
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