I’ve been doing something over the last couple of days that is unusual for me. I was hesistant to even bring it up because it sounds a little nutty. But basically I’m interested in… WORLD DOMINATION. Okay I’ve been watching too many episodes of Pinky And The Brain. I should probably take this back a few steps.

YouTube is the heart of my online video operations. It’s a good place to be. There’s a lot of traffic through that website and a community that has learnt to a greater or lesser extent to rate, comment and subscribe. Though if I’m being completely honest in some respects I’ve sometimes felt like a slave to YouTube, at their will and mercy. I decided earlier in the year that my content was my content (and that hopefully it had a value and merit all of its own, regardless where it ended up). So I decided 2010 would be the year I would start syndicating my video content more widely.

This has been a long time coming and even now is a race of ‘slow and steady’ movement. I started uploading JohnOfJordan videos to both YouTube and LiveVideo. (Though, honestly, LiveVideo does some pretty horrendous things to my video quality.) I then started a JohnOfJordan fan page on Facebook and was surprised to see that some people joined it. Uploading videos to Facebook is a pleasure and their video quality is beautiful. Facebook doesn’t require keyword tags either which is one less thing to think about. [As an aside I had never been a huge Facebook fan but I must say that their pages are amazing. I would probably use one over a NING Community, for example.] Then I uploaded some stuff to Vimeo. There’s a restriction on how much video you can upload to Vimeo in a week. This is sort of an incentive to upgrade to their premium services.

Even as I type I’m uploading a video to Tubemogul to syndicate it to other sites. Tubemogul is a great site where you can upload a video once and have it then be forwarded to a number of different video sites. (I especially recommend using their ‘BIG file uploader’ because it is resumable. If something happens with your connection you can hopefully pick up from where you left off.)

The goal here isn’t to build audiences on other video sharing websites. It’s really just about putting the content out in a lot of places to increase the likelihood of people stumbling upon it. And in some ways it’s about building incoming links to my websites (never forget to include a URL in your video descriptions so viewers can find out more about you).

I’ll be the first person to admit that a lot of the stuff I do has limited appeal. I’m not going out of my way to make people ‘like’ it. I doubt I could even if I wanted to. They’re going to watch it and reach their own conclusions. All I want to do is position my material in enough places that people are given the opportunity to make that evaluation for themselves.

Related Posts:

• JVC Picsio: A Christmas Miracle!
• The Family That Creates Together
• How To See All Your Facebook Friends In News Feed
• Facebook Page
• Facebook and Friendship

I think the graph below is very telling.

I started a new series of video channels on various video sites. There is only one video on each of the channels. It isn’t very interesting. I didn’t tell anyone – not even my closest friends who routinely visit video websites – that they existed. The channel has a grand total of two subscribers (on YouTube) and one of those is another of my own accounts. So obviously we are not expecting big things of these channels or this video. But if you look at the chart produced by Tubemogul you can see a very obvious trend.

A lot more people are finding and watching the video on YouTube than any other video sharing site specified. I’m sure this is something we all know anecdotally. YouTube is synonymous with video now in the same way Google is with search. Indeed the Google owned video sharing website is actually the second most used search engine after Google itself, surpassing Yahoo.

But the other thing to take away from this little experiment is the kind of views a video can get without any kind of promotion whatsoever. I didn’t do anything to promote this video. I could’ve; I have a fairly sizable group of friends within my social network, I could’ve promoted this hard. But I didn’t. Indeed I went out of my way to keep this secret. There weren’t any salacious or misleading keywords, no provocative video thumbnail. It was just a boring video unapologetically presented for what it was and it still got its fair share of views.

If you’ve ever doubted the benefits of having video content on YouTube, I hope those doubts are now alleviated.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Darren Rowse of Problogger recently suggested that ‘text is king.’

He writes:

My Mum Doesn’t Get YouTube.

OK – perhaps Mum could work out YouTube if she put some time aside to learn – but recently I was talking to my family about online video and the blank stares that I got from my parents made me wonder if they’d ever watched a video online before. They’re not online all day every day but the majority of what they do is email and searching for articles on their subjects of interest with Google. They live in ‘text content land’ – right in the middle of it.

Related Posts:

• The Family That Creates Together
• Video Syndication
• JVC Picsio: A Christmas Miracle!
• Is this ‘The Conversation’?