How to get hits on you tube.

[Mark W]

Make a film with a bum in it!

Recent films I have uploaded.

The hunt - short contraversial doc on hunting - 56 views in about 6 weeks.
Drugs - short doc / vp - 87 views in a month.
Videemate - well acted and nicely made scripted comedy - 27 views in a week.
Superpeel - well made and scripted spoof ad - 12 views in 3 days.

Bum therapy - spoof comedy with a BUM in it - nearly 6000 views in about 2 weeks !
and on the above the sound is completely rubbish after you tube encoding.

Sums up you tube really.

[djahna]

many hits in youtube do have a bum in it.. tsktsktsk

[BritishEye]

Great idea to monitor what gets hits on youtube.
Sad outcome, but great idea nevertheless.

[derkvanl]

Some tips from my side. I do have a youtube channel, but I'm not really active in getting more visitors. I have somewhere about 30-50 views a day on 45 videos. But not promoting it either.

A good thumbnail on your video and a title that make people wanna watch it are good to get hits.

Get a friends list, share every video you upload, make sure you got good friends rating your videos and commenting on them. It's important to have some activity going to get more visitors. Get them to subscribe to your channel.

Get something like Hyves.net - Always in touch with your friends or whatever contactsite with friends that allow you to attach videos to your profile. That way you can add some videos to your profile or update it on regular bases with another of your youtube videos.

The thumbnail is created from an image of your video at the 25 / 50 / 75 %-point in the timeline. Make sure you got a good image on one of these moments so you can choose that as thumbnail.

What's in a title?
Use words in the title and tags that people frequently use in searches.
Google Trends can tell you a lot on popular searches.
Smoke up your title, make it something "catchy".

Every day just watch some of the popular / frontpage videos and tun on "active sharing" because it'll show a link to your channel below the video you are watching. Doing that with a video that's being watched a lot will allways get you some clicks on your channel.

Get yourself subscribed to some interesting channels. Get it showing up on your channel. There's so much interesting stuff on youtube, just spend some time searching.

[Marc Peters]

Whilst YouTube's done wonders for helping promote user driven content, it's a sad indictment that videos are judged by 'hits'. As soon as a video reaches a tipping point, it becomes a self perpetuating 'draw' to the video; the video must be good, because so many people are watching it. This then becomes the benchmark for judging a great video, and everything revolves around making sure your video get's 'good hits'. If only people put as much effort into their movie making. In fact I'm fairly confident that most videos on YouTube took longer to upload and promote than they did to be created.

It's merely a reflection of the media market though, isn't it? Such a shame. It's not even as if the technically briliant videos get pushed to the top. Could that be what TV becomes?

[Mark W]

Well said Marc.

The bum film is at 33,000 now, and the curve is up - my bum is now famous the world over, well mostly Japan and US - with middle aged men - funny old world innit.