Friday, November 23, 2007

Blackhat Guide to Promoting YouTube Videos

Dan Ackerman Greenberg wrote a guest post on TechCrunch talking about his job at The Comotion Group to create a “viral hit” out of a given YouTube video advertising his client.

Creating popular videos has a lot less to do with the quality of the content, Dan says, and a lot with what basically comes down to deceitful, spammy tactics. Like using fake headlines for the video, or creating multiple accounts in a forum or on YouTube to then stir up a fake controversy about the video. “Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts,” Dan says, adding elsewhere, “You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own.”

Dan also mentions some fine-tuning tips like making sure the frame YouTube picks from the middle of the video is saucy enough to be catchy when the video is listed on YouTube’s overview pages. Also, Dan suggests that when releasing a set of videos at once, you can pick some unique tags (those not used on YouTube yet) which you then add to all videos of the group... skewing the “related videos” section on YouTube to show only videos of your group. Dan also says that his team won’t shy away from simply deleting negative comments to a video. “We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.”

Dan believes in the success of his companies method. “Our rule of thumb is that if we don’t get a video 100,000 views, we don’t charge.” For “normal” users of YouTube, Dan has this message: “I don’t care how ’viral’ you think your video is; no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it.”

Then again, perhaps Dan’s post in itself is deceitful in parts of its message, trying to achieve the most viral effect possible. Maybe right now, Dan’s team is creating multiple identities on TechCrunch trying to stir up same fake controversy. Dan explains, “Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section – especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.” This time, the brand is his own.

[Thanks Search-Engines-Web!]

Blackhat Guide to Promoti ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+6)

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