So last time we said that the old way is dead. Deader than Bob Hope. Deader than your teenage daughter's boyfriend when her father finds her bra left on the living room couch. Making videos about trending topics and hoping they will be found organically in searches won't work in the world of YouTube 2.0. What now?
Best option, is to forget about YouTube all together. Migrate on over to Viddy or Socialcam with the cool people.
I'm just being facetious but Viddy especially is growing rapidly, but users late to the game in YouTube who found no luck getting their foot in the door are finding that they're amassing thousands of followers on Viddy without hardly even trying.
It's like YouTube back in the day!
The only bad thing (or good depending on how you look at it) about Viddy is that it requires an iPhone to upload videos to it, since the only way to do so is from the Viddy app for iOS, which is free in the store. This makes Viddy cool and exclusive, like Facebook back when it used to require a college e-mail address to get an account. The drawback is of course that if you have Android or no smartphone at all you can't join the club. You can however watch videos and follow users and get a Viddy account without an iPhone, and you will even get followers just by having a cool avatar! But obviously you can't do much unless you have access to the uploading feature.
Oh yeah, the thing that makes Viddy unique is that it restricts video clips to 15 seconds in length, kinda like Twitter restricts posts to 140 characters. So long-winded folks who tend to go on and on, get used to vlogging or doing comedy centered around just one coherent idea. And deliver that with a few concise sentences!
Moar on Viddy coming shortly,
@SpecialFester
Showing posts with label how to be famous. Show all posts
Showing posts with label how to be famous. Show all posts
Monday, June 4, 2012
How to Get More Subscribers on YouTube
I used to have a channel with over 40,000 subscribers before it was taken down back when YouTube used to be real strict about copyright. It was great. I was having a lot of fun, making awesome content, and the interaction with users was rewarding (with the exception of the ever present tr0lls of course).
The most frequent question I would get from users was "how did I do it?" How did I get 40,000 subs (which was A LOT at that time. The most subscribed at that time was Smosh and they were just under a million. Compare that to RayWilliam today who has FIVE MILLION.
The answer to that question at the time was simple. Just make videos, and make them on a consistent basis (i.e. every Wednesday, once every other week, etc.). Now that there is more competition it is much more difficult to do, and changes made by YouTube in how their search works as well as the subscriber manipulation (er... i mean subscriber "adjustment" policy) have complicated things much more.
Today, it is extremely unlikely to be able to attract views purely from organic search (someone finding your video by typing keywords into the search engine and seeing your video in the results). This is because of those changes to the search algorithm I mentioned. Basically, no matter how hot a topic you choose for your video and how well you tag it, it won't be seen by many users because it won't appear in searches for a little bit and by the time it does, other larger users will have vlogged about the same thing and will gobble up all the views for that topic. The new search algorithm highly favors power users (i.e. the ones with many subscribers.) Thus the ones with a lot of subs can easily get more views whereas the little guy can't even get his foot in the door.
So does that mean it's hopeless?
No. Not by a long shot. But the methods to claw your way to the top are different now then in the early years of YouTube. I will be covering these in my next post.
Feel free to contact me on Twitter at any time:-)
@SpecialFester
The most frequent question I would get from users was "how did I do it?" How did I get 40,000 subs (which was A LOT at that time. The most subscribed at that time was Smosh and they were just under a million. Compare that to RayWilliam today who has FIVE MILLION.
The answer to that question at the time was simple. Just make videos, and make them on a consistent basis (i.e. every Wednesday, once every other week, etc.). Now that there is more competition it is much more difficult to do, and changes made by YouTube in how their search works as well as the subscriber manipulation (er... i mean subscriber "adjustment" policy) have complicated things much more.
Today, it is extremely unlikely to be able to attract views purely from organic search (someone finding your video by typing keywords into the search engine and seeing your video in the results). This is because of those changes to the search algorithm I mentioned. Basically, no matter how hot a topic you choose for your video and how well you tag it, it won't be seen by many users because it won't appear in searches for a little bit and by the time it does, other larger users will have vlogged about the same thing and will gobble up all the views for that topic. The new search algorithm highly favors power users (i.e. the ones with many subscribers.) Thus the ones with a lot of subs can easily get more views whereas the little guy can't even get his foot in the door.
So does that mean it's hopeless?
No. Not by a long shot. But the methods to claw your way to the top are different now then in the early years of YouTube. I will be covering these in my next post.
Feel free to contact me on Twitter at any time:-)
@SpecialFester
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