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The article touches on the importance of YouTube’s discovery a bit but doesn’t do justice to just how strong it can be. Multimillion dollar businesses are buil
by MichaelApproved 6y ago
The article touches on the importance of YouTube’s discovery a bit but doesn’t do justice to just how strong it can be.
Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.
From the article:
> “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.”
Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.
Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.
- pjc50 6y ago> Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature. Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.
- once-in-a-while 6y agoBy "conspiracy", do you mean the psy-ops created by 3 letter agencies, or the Truth which most people prefer not to know, because too depressing? There /is/ a bad "elite" out there (not going into details), which people, when confronted, prefer not to know... The Truth Pill is by far the hardest to swallow. You need Real Courage to do so, and you don't seem to be in that league...
- calvinmorrison 6y agoWe've seen a massive movement for companies to post warnings or alerts stating facts might not back up certain content on social media in the last year or so. Fact Checkers they're called. Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"
- 1-more 6y agoI'm with you, except I kind of love those videos. The plywood fabri-cobbled infinite energy pendulum that will be generating boundless power "just as soon as I get the friction down" always looks so cool! The enviable commitment to craftsmanship of the backyard free energy crank ends up producing beautiful, relatable work.
- skinkestek 6y agoYou found anyone who actually believed in it and weren't just trying to scam someone? I always though these were prank/scam videos?
- 1-more 6y agosome really seem like true believers. I'm trying to find the one I'm thinking of because you're right: the search results are overwhelmingly people trying to get you off the site. The casual enthusiast having fun tinkering in the garage is fine by me; it's keeping them out of trouble and a better hobby than, say, boating. But like you I abhor the ruthless exploiter selling you a dream because having to work for a living is garbage. Whether that's the drop shipping get rich quick person, or the "buy my zero point generator" guy.
- kbenson 6y ago> and a better hobby than, say, boating. LOL, as a boat owner that hasn't been out on my boat in quite a few hears, I wholeheartedly agree. On a side note, the payment's due again...
- grugagag 6y agoIt might be inadvertent scam but a lot of these people passionately believe in their ideas. A lot of the time they’re not selling anything and it couldnt be categorized as scam. It’s wishful thinking for all I care
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
- tossawayonphine 6y agoOne could very easily say the same about far left and the violent antifa and blm riots roping in degenerates and socialpaths to create mass hysteria IRL. Looking at your post history Im sure you feel like some sort of justice warrior. How do you feel about the oversexualization of children in such Netflix programs such as Cuties. Are you willing to defend the most innocent and vulnerable of society? I highly doubt it.
- pgalvin 6y agoNot gonna throw my hat into the ring with my own opinion... but isn’t this totally off-topic? We’re talking about YouTube being used as a platform for spreading misinformation/conspiracies/etc. and you’re talking about sexualisation of children on Netflix and are clearly jumping at the opportunity to share your political opinions, and also personally attack and accuse another commenter. Have your political opinions, I won’t address them, but jesus christ don’t be such an ass about it by attacking people in unrelated discussions. Edit: I’ll also add that the original commenter was deliberately vague (didn’t mention “Trump” or specific political groups, for example) to avoid controversy and you come in attempting to bulldoze that by mentioning BLM.
- pjc50 6y ago> How do you feel about the oversexualization of children in such Netflix programs such as Cuties. Are you willing to defend the most innocent and vulnerable of society? I highly doubt it. I've seen that go by on Twitter and am not impressed .. should I call for it to be cancelled? (Mind you, a stock feminist answer might be that the Netflix series is just a representation of a whole rotten child beauty pageant culture which in turn derives from the sexist adult beauty pageant culture, and that nobody should be sexualised without their consent - which cannot appropriately be given by people who are underage.)
- kbenson 6y ago> and that nobody should be sexualised without their consent - which cannot appropriately be given by people who are underage Except that we expect parents to be stewards for our children and give consent on their behalf, except in cases where we've decided that parents cannot be trusted to do so and we outlaw that activity for children (sex, alcohol, etc), or that consent does not fully convey the situation (a parent forcing an unwilling child to get a haircut is not viewed the same as a child forcing an unwilling child to play a full contact sport which is also not viewed the same as a parent forcing a child to get into a fistfight on the street). Where do parents sexualizing their children for television fall into this? I dunno. If they were doing it for an individual that came over and paid in person, we'd have some real probing questions, but it's okay when it's on TV for a national audience?
- syshum 6y agoAhhhh yes only the Far Right relies on that, but not the Far Left no no no
- faster 6y agoSerious question: what are the 'far-left' analogs of QAnon, Pizzagate, and the anti-vax and flat earth movements? I'm sure it's just my bias, but I can't think of any right now.
- syshum 6y agoThey go by many names, but there is a Strong undercurrent of "Capitalism Bad we must have socialism" crowd on the far left that hate individual freedoms and rights and prefer Group rights and entitlements. That promote equality of outcome not equality of opportunity. That reject merit and instead want to define people based on dynamics of intersectionality. >>AntiVax - Flat Earth To Attribute them only to far right tells me you do not really understand these groups. They are not left or right politically, especially anti-vax for which many have far-left economic and social positions
- arp242 6y agoA different/wrong/naïve political ideology is not the same as "Hilary Clinton is literally raping children in the basement of a pizza restaurant".
- syshum 6y agoOk how about "the Milwaukee police covering up for a sex traffic ring"
- arp242 6y agoI don't know anything about this, so I can't comment. But sex trafficking and cover-ups do happen; see: Jimmy Savile, Catholic church, Epstein, Bill Cosby, etc. From a very quick search it seems that the police didn't take several cases serious, and were at the very least rather lax in their attitude. In other words, there's at least an actual crime and at least some smoke. It's not something invented from nothing. And this is the real danger of this sort of politicized conspiracy bullshit: now this is automatically seen as "politically motivated" instead of actually looking at the matter at hand. People who spread pizzagate-esque conspiracy theories or enable them are very much harming the anti-paedophilia efforts.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago> Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority Is it though? I don’t make videos, but if I did it wouldn’t be as “my job”, it would be because I had information to share. My favorite YouTube videos and channels aren’t “personalities” being “influencers”. I guess I just don’t measure success in “popularity”. I don’t think my number one goal would be to get to people, it would be to contribute something useful to a couple people that could use that info. I would value a good and reliable search feature over the highest possible user base, but this is all just me. I am aware there are people that need the attention / viewership more than I do.
- ashtonkem 6y agoIf you count on ad revenue in any way, getting subscriptions matters. This is true even for channels that wouldn’t be categorized as (scare quotes) “influencers”. Your subscriber count directly affects your ability to turn each new video into more views and therefore more ad revenue.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago> If you count on ad revenue in any way, Maybe relying on Google to share -or- arbitrarily decide not to share money that they get in from their massive advertising machine with you... isn’t a good business model?
- numpad0 6y agoI’ve seen couple anecdotes that Japanese artists and amateur musicians get better view counts on Nico Nico Douga(Japanese clone of 2010s YouTube - also inspiration for Chinese Bilibili), despite obviously having far less active users, so I think it’s possible that trying to gain audiences within YouTube could be not as important as perceived, especially the purpose of doing so isn’t to gain more affiliate fees.
- dylan604 6y agoAs a video creator, who in the world would go to all of the effort to create a video, upload it to youtube, and then delete every single piece of the original content in their possession leaving the final in YT as the only surviving copy? WHO? IDIOTS.
- chefandy 6y agoPeople who have limited storage resources? One of the wonderful things about making content for YouTube is its low barrier to entry, and that probably includes a lot of people using their mom's hand-me-down MacBook Air. Maybe people who haven't been bitten by significant data loss before? Sure, it usually only takes once, but maybe that would be their first time? Lots of young people on that platform that are probably really used to everything just kind of automatically being backed up in a cloud somewhere. Someone not having your level of prudence and understanding in their MO doesn't mean they're idiots. Did you learn everything you know by reading the docs and best practices recommendations and acting accordingly, or did it take a couple of stinging mistakes to bring you to where you are? Your attitude is the stuff that nightmare bosses/parents/teachers/mentors are made of. Mellow out.
- untog 6y agoVideo files are large, so you usually have to store them on some kind of external disk. And it's very possible to lose an external disk. If videos are your livelihood then I imagine you're going to be a lot more disciplined than that but there are plenty of hobbyist vloggers out there.
- dylan604 6y agoI manage petabytes of storage of media content. While this content is not mine, I'm just saying I'm fully aware of the size of video content. My personal video archive is in the hundreds of TBs. I have put forth the effort to save my content in multiple formats aw well as locally, offsite, and in the cloud. I'm saving RAW content. Most "YouTubers" are producing MP4 video content which is tiny compared to RAW. If I can do it, they can too. I guarantee YouTubers making money are making way more money than I am.
- ashtonkem 6y agoYouTube owns more than discovery too: they own relationship between viewers and producers. Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to actually contact me about new content, and they’d lose me. Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new platform alone is insufficient.
- v7p1Qbt1im 6y agoThat‘s why you plug your twitter and maybe other socials (mailing list as well I guess, though less usual) at every possible opportunity. It‘s incredibly important to cultivate the relationship with your audience. In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.
- chrisco255 6y agoTwitter has the same problem as YouTube. Email is a federated open source protocol and far superior as way of securing your fan base. It's probably a great idea for content providers to self-host a website with their videos on it as well.
- sebastianconcpt 6y agoBeing censorship-proof is INFINITELY more important than "Multimillion dollar businesses" done on censorable platforms which invariably will become evil (not if but when).
- bitwize 6y agoDo you have a philosophical justification for that argument?
- santadakota 6y agoDefinitely agree on priority #2. My flow for watching youtube has been to subscribe and sign up for email alerts (the bell). When I had some time to watch, I'd scan my youtube alerts email folder for items of interest. It was efficient and would quickly leave me with a queue of videos. That workflow went away for me this month: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/63269933?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/63269933?hl=en I don't even know what the alert bell is for now. If I look at notifications its full of "recommendations". If I go to my subscriptions its random items from all my subscriptions regardless of "the bell".
- chrshawkes 6y agoI have over 160k+ subscribers. What you say is correct and something I've known for years. Build your own platform and hope others will follow you wherever you go. YouTube is a temporary marketing platform at the moment but there are still huge amounts of potential. I have no faith in it's long term stability though.
- dudus 6y agoA good example to show how much discoverability is important. Check Blender's Peertube [1] and compare to their Youtube Channel [2]. At the time of writing the latest video is a week old and has 27K views on YouTube while a measly 28 views on PeerTube. Those figures alone show that it's not even worth to keep an instance up and running for this. I doubt it even counts as an insurance policy against Google shenanigans, you are likely to lose all viewership if your channel goes kaput anyway. The only way this can possibly be successful for anyone is if they make huge investments in marketing and that carries a risk that even then it may never pay back. YouTube just provides immense value through discovery. You may not like it but there's no denying. [1] https://video.blender.org/ https://video.blender.org/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/c/BlenderFoundation/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/BlenderFoundation/videos
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago"None of my videos have ever gotten a large number of views, and none are monetized, so I might as well copy them to a PeerTube instance I control." As we know, there is a growing history of unexpected changes or even phase-outs of services/features that were once considered fixtures provided by Google. There is nothing I am aware of that says a user could/should not simultaneously 1. keeps backups of her work on physcial media in her possession (as well "in the cloud"), 2. host her work on YouTube or some similarly commercial service, and 3. self-host her work on PeerTube. The decision to diversify should not matter whether the videos have significant views or not. If both services are free, do you have to "move" from service X to service Y, or can you can just "copy" (mirror).