Today, I find myself showing up on the forum to speak of one of the reasons why I am against off-YouTube advertising as a means of getting views.
There are three main concepts that I use against the idea of advertising your content off of YouTube.
| Hollow Views | Abuse of the system | Wants over Needs |
Each of those should eventually be a hyperlink to the other post if you would like to read up a little more on why I despise the act of consistently posting to forums to get your views.
HOLLOW VIEWS
The hollow views concept is one that is simple and yet elegant in its fundamental importance to your growth on YouTube. For the purpose of this, I am going to bring back my "Stella" character found in my "The Prospect of Money" post that I made a while back.
Chronologically in her timeline, this is within her first two months of making YouTube, and she's looking at some ways to increase her overall viewership on the video sharing platform.
~Discovery
After creating content for almost two months, Stella decides its time to dig in to the world of off-YouTube social sharing. She quickly finds a plethora of subreddits that are dedicated to the act of sharing videos, a rather pleasing fact, Stella quickly shares her least popular video on the subreddit to see what it produces.
Within 24 hours, the video generates an extra 20 views. Within those 20 views, she got 4 comments. Stella just loves commentors, but then there is a catch. When you boil them down to the basic structure of the comment, no matter how much it reads in review of her video or questions of her. All four of the comments ended with the gist of "check out my channel".
Stella is highly educated, both in school and about practices on the internet, and instantly recognizes this as spam. Almost immediately, all four comments are deleted and the users are banned from commenting on the channel. Confused, she waits it out, and checks her analytics for the day that she posted the video on the subreddit, and what she finds shocks her.
The video shared was 7 minutes long, and out of 20 views on that day, there was only 8 watch minutes, that's an average of 24 seconds of view time per view.
This is where the hollow views concept comes into play. After posting it on the subreddit, she exposed her content to a large group of people not directly interested in her content. This means that the 20 people who watched were people who happened to be browsing the subreddit at the time and the post on the subreddit overrides her video SEO.
Let's add a little more substance to the video she posted. The video she shared on the subreddit was a video about how she felt about the treatment of minorities in society (just to come up with a polarized topic). When she shared it, she exposed it to YouTubers, rather than people who'd directly be interested in learning about what people thought about the treatment of minorities.
This in the world of SEO is known as access to a group that isn't your target market. Sharing your video on a subreddit teeming with other YouTubers is like setting up a nail salon in a New York ghetto. It's not a very bright idea and does not suit the location.
Within the shock she came up with an idea. To see if it was the video content that was problematic, she decides to make a video marketed towards other YouTubers that explains why comments like that are a violation of the ToS and to try to get the point across about why one shouldn't do that.
After posting it on the subreddit, within 24 hours in became really obvious that the video was far more popular and had far less spammy comments than her other video, and it very easily proved her suspicion about people who post on those forums.
Those who posted there simply cared for their own content with little care for others who wanted their own content to be noticed. When they see someone else post, they saw it as an opportunity to get some extra exposure for their own channel and while at the risk of channel termination, post a spammy comment on the other person's channel. They were too ignorant to the fact they were doing something wrong to realize that it was wrong, and never thought about how it could impact their channel.
A hollow view is a view by someone who didn't necessarily want to see your content in the first place. Often found in views gained from subreddits and forums, these views are coupled with spammy comments and low view times.
Posting on a forum or subreddit overrides your SEO while simultaneously exposing your content to a market not likely meant to view your content.
On YouTube, true growth is found only in organic views and videos. The kind you get where your only intervention is when you posted your video.
I had to speak with one person about how subscribers were nothing without the views or watch time to back them up. He had gained 200 subscribers within two weeks, which sounds great but it looked bad on his channel since he was still getting the same amount of views per video.
200 people subscribed but 200 people weren't watching.
The next in this series of posts will be posted tomorrow, and will go over 'abuse of the system'. It will look further into people who comment spam on other channels and how people try to manipulate others to view their content, as well as how others may react to you spamming on their channel.
There are three main concepts that I use against the idea of advertising your content off of YouTube.
| Hollow Views | Abuse of the system | Wants over Needs |
Each of those should eventually be a hyperlink to the other post if you would like to read up a little more on why I despise the act of consistently posting to forums to get your views.
HOLLOW VIEWS
The hollow views concept is one that is simple and yet elegant in its fundamental importance to your growth on YouTube. For the purpose of this, I am going to bring back my "Stella" character found in my "The Prospect of Money" post that I made a while back.
Chronologically in her timeline, this is within her first two months of making YouTube, and she's looking at some ways to increase her overall viewership on the video sharing platform.
~Discovery
After creating content for almost two months, Stella decides its time to dig in to the world of off-YouTube social sharing. She quickly finds a plethora of subreddits that are dedicated to the act of sharing videos, a rather pleasing fact, Stella quickly shares her least popular video on the subreddit to see what it produces.
Within 24 hours, the video generates an extra 20 views. Within those 20 views, she got 4 comments. Stella just loves commentors, but then there is a catch. When you boil them down to the basic structure of the comment, no matter how much it reads in review of her video or questions of her. All four of the comments ended with the gist of "check out my channel".
Stella is highly educated, both in school and about practices on the internet, and instantly recognizes this as spam. Almost immediately, all four comments are deleted and the users are banned from commenting on the channel. Confused, she waits it out, and checks her analytics for the day that she posted the video on the subreddit, and what she finds shocks her.
The video shared was 7 minutes long, and out of 20 views on that day, there was only 8 watch minutes, that's an average of 24 seconds of view time per view.
This is where the hollow views concept comes into play. After posting it on the subreddit, she exposed her content to a large group of people not directly interested in her content. This means that the 20 people who watched were people who happened to be browsing the subreddit at the time and the post on the subreddit overrides her video SEO.
Let's add a little more substance to the video she posted. The video she shared on the subreddit was a video about how she felt about the treatment of minorities in society (just to come up with a polarized topic). When she shared it, she exposed it to YouTubers, rather than people who'd directly be interested in learning about what people thought about the treatment of minorities.
This in the world of SEO is known as access to a group that isn't your target market. Sharing your video on a subreddit teeming with other YouTubers is like setting up a nail salon in a New York ghetto. It's not a very bright idea and does not suit the location.
Within the shock she came up with an idea. To see if it was the video content that was problematic, she decides to make a video marketed towards other YouTubers that explains why comments like that are a violation of the ToS and to try to get the point across about why one shouldn't do that.
After posting it on the subreddit, within 24 hours in became really obvious that the video was far more popular and had far less spammy comments than her other video, and it very easily proved her suspicion about people who post on those forums.
Those who posted there simply cared for their own content with little care for others who wanted their own content to be noticed. When they see someone else post, they saw it as an opportunity to get some extra exposure for their own channel and while at the risk of channel termination, post a spammy comment on the other person's channel. They were too ignorant to the fact they were doing something wrong to realize that it was wrong, and never thought about how it could impact their channel.
A hollow view is a view by someone who didn't necessarily want to see your content in the first place. Often found in views gained from subreddits and forums, these views are coupled with spammy comments and low view times.
Posting on a forum or subreddit overrides your SEO while simultaneously exposing your content to a market not likely meant to view your content.
On YouTube, true growth is found only in organic views and videos. The kind you get where your only intervention is when you posted your video.
I had to speak with one person about how subscribers were nothing without the views or watch time to back them up. He had gained 200 subscribers within two weeks, which sounds great but it looked bad on his channel since he was still getting the same amount of views per video.
200 people subscribed but 200 people weren't watching.
The next in this series of posts will be posted tomorrow, and will go over 'abuse of the system'. It will look further into people who comment spam on other channels and how people try to manipulate others to view their content, as well as how others may react to you spamming on their channel.
Last edited:
