10e20 Blog

One of the easiest ways to raise the visibility of your site with video on YouTube is to use video “annotations”. Annotations are short textual notes that you can post in the video player and publish to your videos. And while annotations don’t yet allow you to link OUT of YouTube, they do allow you type in a URL in text form without linking, which is 1 step in the right direction to tying your great video content back to your site/brand name.

There are currently 3 useful types of annotations:

• notes
• speech bubbles
• spotlights

What do annotations and speech bubbles look like? This video has a brief example of both.

Why are annotations useful?

• Write in your domain name or
• Write in further information about your brand or products.
• Write in addresses, locations, names.

Have you ever wondered how videos show up in web search engine results? How do videos get hundreds of thousands to millions of views on YouTube? Who’s watching my videos? Well, with a little hard work on optimizing and networking your video content and a helpful tool called YouTube Insight, you can be on your way to working with video and optimizing it for real business results.

YouTube Insight is a handy analytics tool that displays statistics for YouTube Videos. By using Insight you’ll discover statistics such as:

• how many views your video has over specific periods of time,
• the demographic and geographic breakouts of the views and
• how people are finding the video content (web search, YouTube search, embed, etc…)

Though Insight’s data is not always 100% accurate (YouTube states this when you are working with it) and can use some further development in features and functionality, it’s a great start to gaining “insight” to this ever so important media.

Looking for a new way to attract talent to your organization? Follow P Diddy’s lead and turn to YouTube.

So far Diddy has received over 10,000 applicants who have all responded via a taped video that is then uploaded to YouTube. Want the job? Be sure to follow these guidelines:

1. Upload your video interview to YouTube and sell yourself

2. Keep it to 3 minutes or less

3. Tag it as “diddy assistant”

So what are the benefits of this?

Get people who are familair with new technology. Would he really want someone as his assistant who can’t make a simple video and upload it?

Exposure to a massive amount of people and weed out unqualified applicants quickly. First impressions are everything…

Your employees will see that you think outside of the box – and you will attract people who also do.

The Wall Street Journal had a good article today about how to be a star in a YouTube world. What conclusions did they come to?

It turns out that success in the new-media world depends on a lot of the same things as in the old-media universe. Just as in Hollywood, becoming a hit takes talent, effort, timing and some luck. Sex appeal is just as valuable online as off. And getting noticed by the “mainstream” press also helps build buzz.

Here are their 6 steps to success:

1) Be consistent. Whether you are doing videos, podcasts or writing blog posts – consistently feed your audience their content.

2) Get in early. It takes more to get noticed now. Just starting something today? Find a way to be one of the first to do something.

Google owned YouTube is going to start sharing revenues with users. They said they were originally against it because they wanted video lovers not money lovers. Now they realize that the money lovers can probably create some killer video. Co-founder Chad Hurley made the announcement today:

We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users,” Hurley said. “So in the coming months we are going to be opening that up.

One major YouTube competitor Revver already has a revenue share plan in place that shares ad revenues with users and this has been a major selling point of their service. From their About page:

Sharers earn money too! Help spread Revver videos and earn 20% of the ad revenue. The remaining money is split 50/50 between the creator of the video and Revver.

Vidmeter can supposedly tell you. Launched in late December (I think the 30th to be exact), Vidmeter crawls the top 10 video sites (Break.com, Daily Motion, Google, iFilm, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, vSocial, Yahoo, and Youtube) and ranks the videos to determine the most popular.

First, Vidmeter’s software automatically records the numbered of views and comments from the top listed videos once per hour. Their editors then merge similar videos on multiple websites (for example an SNL skit that was uploaded multiple times).

It then automatically ranks videos for the day by counting the difference between that day’s view total and the previous day’s view total. The most viewed videos are the most popular and ranked highest. The final step is the latest view and comment counts are set as the “all time” counts for the videos and they are ranked accordingly.

I was just on YouTube surfing around a bit and I notice a video featured on the right – so I click on it. It looks really professional and IMO lame.

So I click through and realize that it is actually a commercial for Boost mobile. Hmmm – it certainly didn’t seem like an ad to me and it seems like that’s the feeling from a lot of people in the YouTube Community:

nice. a commercial – didn’t see it “badged” as an ad- that’s kind of deceptive, no?

Everyone, click Inappropriate , flag the commercial and rise against google . Remain a search engine only. Keep your google videos, we have YouTube. (btw, why don’t they just call it Goo Tube from now on :/?)

Why is there a commercial on youtube?

This ad was posted by a “real” user called atomic2797 (who has only submitted one other video showing a Suzuki GSXR doing 165 mph…