The first video I would like to deal with was part of my research of increasing views. This is Cory “Mr. Safety” Williams from SMP Films. In this video he discusses getting views on You Tube. I think I believe what he says, because he claims to have “over 75 MILLION views and 175000 SUBSCRIBERS.”
One of the first things he talks about is something that will make Nathan smile, doing tutorial videos. Nathan has wanted to do some tutorial videos for a while, and it’s one of those things that have never officially made it to a ten weeks goals list.
The video is about twelve minutes long, and if you are concerned about getting views on You Tube, you can invest that time. If you’re not that worried about it, but are curious what he says, here are some of the points.
He talks about subscribers only accounting for so many of the views you get, but that having subscribers can get you an initial barrage of comments, which can land you on the “Most Discussed” list.
He talks about something that I’ve been on about for years, which is collaboration on videos with others in order to bring their audience to you for a moment at least. I was always saying that we should become our own media by interviewing people and bands, and by that means we could bring people to our website. We flirted with the idea when we taped the Poet’s Alliance of North Texas for public access, and I have taped a couple of bands in my time. It’s still not something that we ever fully explored.
So he’s said something relevant to Nathan, and then something relevant to me. What about Miguel? Oh yeah! Miguel for whatever reason likes to get into fights with assholes in the comments section. They come along and say things to him like he’s old, ugly, and needs to quit making videos and move out of his mom’s house. So Miguel wastes his time actually responding. I’m not sure why.
To me writing criticism in the comment section of a video is just childish behaviour, and if there is one thing that I’ve learned while raising children, it’s that you don’t give attention to negative behaviour, ever. The reason is simple.
Children understand attention as just attention. They don’t differentiate between positive and negative attention. This is the reason why putting their face in a corner is more effective than spanking. When you have your face in a corner you are getting no outside stimulation. At that point, you associate the bad behaviour with being shutdown. On the other hand, if you yell at the child, or sit down and explain to them why what they did was bad, what you are doing is associating the bad bahaviour with attention. If you don’t believe me, you can watch how adults act. You hear about the need for approval, but have you ever noted the way people act when they don’t get approval? It’s just as attention seeking.
This is the same with You Tube comments. You simply ignore them, and they are likely to go elsewhere to act a fool. And face it, they didn’t watch your video to begin with, and they aren’t going to forward it to their friends, so you don’t need them.
This Cory fellow talks about posting consistently. He says that if you’re posting at least once a week then people will potentially come back frequently to see what you have that is new.
This is of course provided they like what you posted in the first place, but you have no direct control over quality beyond the time you take, the tools you use, and the experience you have. Yeah, sounds like a lot of control, but strangely there are so many other factors that go into it. The biggest one I think being appeal to others. You can figure out how to make many people like you, but you will never figure out how to make everybody like you. There are people out there who will hate you just because you’re so likeable. Luckily, I don’t have that problem, because I’m really not that likeable.
Finally, he says that he has no idea how to get your video featured, and as near as I can tell, You Tube doesn’t make their process for featuring publicly known.
So in answer to Miguel’s question about why this video has views. First of all it’s about a subject that people care about: getting views. Second, this guy has apparently kept busy producing and posting videos. It helps, I’m sure, that he’s been doing this since 2005.