Twenty days have passed by with Dirty Old Boots being in the public domain. And it has been a good twenty days. We are adding about a thousand views every day on average which to my mind is pretty decent going. And we are getting 300 views or thereabouts to almost each video we launch in just a few hours. And then ... kaput. It freezes. The views that is. YouTube seems to have some kind of policy against increasing the number of views beyond 300 or thereabouts mark. Probably for new kids on the block like Dirty Old Boots. They might think that we are somehow manipulating the views. How can a video become so popular is so short a time, particularly if it does not have some crazy, zany, kinky, wierd stuff? And there are a lot of kinky things going on on YouTube. Take a look at some of the popular videos and channels. Millions and millions of views, thousands of subscribers, for what to my illiterate mind seems to be utter rubbish.
We were watching a video made by a guy which has got a zillion views. The video is about this guy being a snake. He hisses, he makes strange noises, even stranger faces, has a hat on that no right thinking person would be caught dead in. There is absolutely nothing in the video that is worth watching. Yet, a zillion or so people have watched it alrfeady and we in the office milled around the screen and watched it too. We laughed, we kicked ourselves, questioned why we were wasting our time, yet there it was, playing itself out.
I get the feeling that videos need to be zany, utterly without a plot, strange ramblings of people, uttering stuff which no one should be interested in. But yet, the proof the the pudding as they say. Huge amounts of traction.
Maybe we are going wrong somewhere. Maybe we need to put in some zany stuff. We were talking in the office in the afternoon. We call ourselves Dirty Old Boots. Let us make a video of a bunch of people throwing dirty boots at each other. Better still ... every one smelling dirty boots and shoes and socks. Maybe a candid camera of people wearing dirty boots. Heaven knows what, but we need to be knocking on those doors to figure out what we need to do to make videos go viral.
But then we also need to figure out how to make YouTube decided that we are not manipulating the numbers, and give us the actual viewership data. We are at 12,000 views as of now. My feeling is it should be at least thrice as high.
The other thing that I have not been able to figure out is the YouTube rankings. One day one video or a channel is at the number one spot, the next day it disappears right off the charts. A look at the numbers shows up a highly viewed video at a lower ranking than a video which has been seen by far lesser number of people.
I think I have not yet figured out how YouTube works. They seem to have a system in the madness, and I need to figure out what that madness is.
One thing is for sure. Even though our videos are well produced and with a lot of information, what is lacking is the glam quotient. I don't think people are interested in watching my gob in video after video, or listen to me droning on and on. What we need is another anchor, a female anchor. With personality, poise and appeal. The hunt is on.
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