I started making videos for Youtube at the end of January, and I’ve learned quite a bit about the whole “Youtube game”. I wanted to post some thoughts about it here.

1. I’ve learned that the videos that give me the most hits, are not the ones I like to do. The videos that I find to be creative and funny tend to average 100-200 hits after a week of being posted. They average 10-20 comments in that same time period.

The ones that score the most views and comments are the videos involving no creativity, and often not a lot of humor. These are usually videos where I talk about something that’s currently big in the media. If I say some absurd and unpopular things about the subject as a joke, I get even more hits and comments. (hate comments mostly)

For example, when that video of the Marine throwing a puppy off a cliff hit the news and everyone lost their minds and went apeshit over it, I posted a joke video saying it was funny and awesome. Within 2 days, that one video had more hits and comments than about 50 videos combined that had been posted for up to 2 months. It also got something like 300 hate comments in 3 days. I ended up disabling comments on it because I was sick of having an inbox full of ridiculous hate mail. Finally I just deleted the whole video.

That stupid puppy video got me an honor for being the #9 most watched Comedian of the day. I found it rather disheartening actually. A video that wasn’t really even funny got me that honor. After that, I seriously wondered if I still wanted to make videos on Youtube. Compared with that and a couple of other media-related videos, my creative stuff was being largely ignored. Which brings me into my next thought…

2. The best ways to get noticed on Youtube are to game the system or make videos about hugely popular subjects. I’ve learned that several (if not all) of the biggest Youtubers on the site, gamed the system in some way to get themselves noticed. Apparently they’ve done it through page-refreshing, creating tons of fake accounts and subscribing to themselves, and other ways that I’m not entirely clear on.

That’s another discouraging thing about Youtube. The people who game the system are being rewarded while the users who don’t are being lost in the sea of videos. Some will argue that it’s all fair and the ones who game the system just want it more. For the most part, I’ll agree with that. If I was desperate to get a little bit of Youtube fame, I’d probably game the system too. But to me, gaming the system is like cheating to get a high score on an online leaderboard. Yeah, that’s your name on the top for everyone to see, but not having actually earned it, takes away the glory of it.

3. The Partnership Program: I’m not a partner, and I haven’t tried applying to be one. There doesn’t seem to be any standards when it comes to who gets to be a partner and who doesn’t. Youtube has denied fairly well known vloggers who get a reasonable amount of views, in favor of some other users who do some rather odd things. Here’s a good example:

Gimmeabreakman has 7746 subscribers, 303187 channel views, and his 179 videos get thousands of views. He was rejected from the partnership program. He’s a well known vlogger around the site. Apparently he was also rejected after being INVITED to join the partnership program. (I can’t verify that, just saw it on Utubedrama)

Now, who DID make it into the partnership program?

jordanrutledge01 He’s a young man who got his views by making 1-2 second video responses to other videos. In these responses he just looks at the camera in an odd way and doesn’t speak.Only after becoming a partner has he actually started making “real” videos. He has 3844 subscribers and was into the whole “Sub 4 Sub” culture on Youtube. Now, I will give him credit. I have never seen anyone else do video responses like his, so yeah that was clever and original in a way. But it’s only funny a couple of times, and he’s done around 60 of them. Those videos average around 20-30 comments each, mostly negative. The ratings on those vids average 1.5-2.5 stars.

If I posted a video about this on Youtube, I’d get a lot of comments from people saying I was jealous or bitter. That’s only partially true. I’m not jealous. He got his views and subscribers doing his own thing. I don’t care for HOW he got them, but he got them. Sub 4 Sub is a shitty Youtube thing that seems to have started after the partnership program started, and mainstream media started picking up on certain Youtubers.

I am bitter that users like jordanrutledge01 are in the program, while better video makers are not. I’d love to see JohnCocktoston in the partnership program. His videos are always funny and entertaining, and usually are very relevant to Youtube. He makes an effort to put out quality videos and doesn’t rely on dubious methods to get views. So yes, I am a little bitter that there are quality video makers on Youtube who aren’t being rewarded for their work, while some not so quality users are. Ok I know Partners don’t make jack shit on their videos, but every little bit helps.

If Youtube is not going to have any set standards on who will be in the partnership program, why not just make everyone a partner when they sign up for an account? Metacafe and Revver do it, along with other websites I’m sure.

4. Youtube seriously needs to fix their interfaces. I keep having some of my settings switch back after every few days. Most notably the channel photo icon. I’ve set that thing countless times to NOT set itself to the thumbnail from my latest video, but every few days, it is somehow resets back to the default.

And fix the god damn messaging system too…

Ok damn that was a long blog, but I just needed to express my opinions. I don’t like to be serious too often, but sometimes I just need to be.

Oh and I couldn’t be fucked spell checking this or searching for errors, so, sorry if there’s a shitload of fuck in this post.

Wayne