Secret & PROOF to Hit Viral Video!

Comment

Comment by Charles on May 12, 2009 at 5:18am

Is anyone still running this site ?

Comment by Brent Goodman on November 23, 2007 at 9:04pm

READ THE ONE ABOVE....

there is over 360 comments on the site now, so check there if you want, but this one really is insightful.

I have engineered youtube viral vids for clients in the past, very successfully, and used all the same techniques Dan mentioned above, (plus one he didn't mention but probably does know and is still keeping it a secret!)

So this article was great publicity for Dan, cuz only people interested in hiring him are ones who don't have a moral issue with it, and those that do have an issue with it are irrelevant to him!

Comment by Brent Goodman on November 23, 2007 at 8:58pm

HERE'S THE COMMENTS....

1. chris

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:19 pm

Violation of Youtube POS, wouldn’t you say?
2. chris

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:20 pm

TOS
3. Michael Arrington

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:25 pm

I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.
4. EH

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:26 pm

This post is a great example of bubble logic: “The echo chamber tells you what to copy.”
5. Michael Arrington

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm

I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.
6. Someone...

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:35 pm

Misleading titles, creating fake user accounts and talking to themselves, deleting comments they don’t like, paying bloggers to post videos … what a great company that would be to work for, I can’t imagine why anyone (knowingly) would use them, with all of the “fake” views the videos get because of them.
7. Mike - "interesting"

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:35 pm

Michael,

Really appreciate your honesty here. There are few who would comment so openly about their own blog.

But it raises a KEY question. It seems this article went into “press” without you knowing about it? That’s bizarre!

Or in other words, seems like there is no editorial process at TechCrunch. If that is the case, should we (the readers) trust the authenticity of the facts listed in TechCrunch blog?

Thanks,
Mike
8. collis

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:38 pm

Wow that was a very enlightening and insightful article, thank you for writing that!!
9. Omar

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:39 pm

lol, the founder and editor of a very popular blog doesn’t even know whos writing what.
10. Vasco de Balboa

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:39 pm

Fantastic article
11. Devin

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:42 pm

Michael you got it exactly right. I have a small startup company that would benefit from a viral video but I would never work with a company that lacks integrity.
12. Someone else...

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:43 pm

So basically it’s all about using various forms of spam? Classy.

What next, an article on how to make money from stock market scams and flogging dodgy pills?
13. collis

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:43 pm

The first two links give me 404s anyhow, so I suppose it’s sort of similar to not having them there :-)

Oh well, I for one am happy that was published, as it was a very interesting read!
14. Chris R.

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:44 pm

My god, the interweb is so contrived. You have really opened my eyes.

I will never view online videos the same way again. I heard this guy was the creative force behind Star wars kid as well on a covert mission to a Montreal high school a few years back. As a matter of fact I have seen his image in random pictures through time where something spontaneously went viral. Wait, isn’t he actually “the doctor”?
15. Someone...

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:46 pm

I can’t say that it wasn’t an interesting read, but still it’s still bait and switch and other low ball techniques used to make the stuff popular.
16. Chris R.

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:46 pm

“I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.”

You guys and Scoble do this constantly for Valley startups. Pellleeaasseee.
17. Henk

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:47 pm

Wow! It was one hell of an interesting post! Thanx!
I just can’t figure out why he would post something like this…:S
18. Dan Ackerman Greenberg

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:49 pm

Quick response:

What we do is grease the viral wheels. If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares? It’s all about entertainment - we’re just making the whole experience entertaining, not just the video itself.

Dan
19. Devin

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:50 pm

Wow that comment is worse then the post.
20. Someone...

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm

And how does commenting back and forth between (fake) users, regardless of the video’s content, help make the experience entertaining?
21. Omar

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm

Dan you are an idiot.
22. Mike

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:00 pm

I didn’t know Stanford had a “Spamming 101″ class :)
23. lol

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:01 pm

From LinkedIn:

Notable clients include: 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros Records, Fox Atomic, Walden Media, Yari Film Group, Nike, Oakley, …

:)
24. Utah Car Donation

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:02 pm

Wish we had had these tips during our video promotion last year.
25. The One Campaign

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:04 pm

Sounds like an intra-office viral campaign :)
26. scarabic

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:04 pm

I am also disgusted by this.

I am also surprised it went up without further review, but then I don’t know much about the editorial flow at TechCrunch. However that does not imply that there isn’t one.

I’ve seen semi-shilly posts on TechCrunch before and they’re usually up front about it, fully disclosing any personal interests. They’re also usually still interesting. This was interesting too, which I’d argue is a reason to publish it here.

Interesting and disgusting. Carry on!
27. William

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:06 pm

Of course, Dan. Who would care about a little fraud in pursuit of a buck? I mean, as long as it moves the goods, there’s nothing wrong with fooling the populace.

Idiot. The reason your trickery is necessary that your venal predecessors in advertising have burned their credibility in other media already. And now here you are, a leech on a new medium, feeding off the trust that other people have built up. Pathetic.

I can’t help but note you don’t provide a single verifiable fact about your business above. The simple assumption is that you lie to your clients just as glibly as you lie to the general public. If fake videos and fake comments, why not fake views, fake click-throughs, and fake campaign success? I’m sure it pays just as well.
28. scarabic

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:06 pm

>>If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares?

I care. Anyone who manages an online community cares. You’re bringing a commercial interest into a shared space under false pretenses. How is that not spam?
29. Duck Bill

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:06 pm

How do we know that “Dan” isn’t just creating all this controversy with his own “posting back and forth” technique?

weird.

very insightful and I can’t wait to try some of the strategies. How can you compete when everyone else, and I mean everyone else, is doing this?
30. Peter Andrews

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:07 pm

Dan, between SUPost and this you seem to have a great eye for picking startups that really have their morals in the right place….
31. Ryan Milnes

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:10 pm

Can’t wait to hear Arrington’s reply. Should be interesting.
32. someone

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm

Hmmmm…I wonder if they’re posting things in the comment section here to try to be controversial and engage more users…
33. Nick

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm

People are always going to find a way around/manipulate things to their own advantage. Ethics aside, I thought it was well done and I imagine many videos producers will use these tricks now
34. techcrunchreader

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:12 pm

unethical,
wrong,
dishonorable,
immoral,
debauched,
degenerate,
degraded,
dissipated,
dissolute,
libertine,
profligate,
riotous,
disgraceful,
scandalous,
shameful,
shocking,
scrofulous.

One word: Ingenious

Wish I had thought of this before, great post Dan, thanks for sharing
35. Dan Ackerman Greenberg

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:13 pm

Duck Bill - seems to me like Mike is actually the one inspiring the controversy here….
36. Martin

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:15 pm

Definitely an interesting article but Dan, are you happy having built your business model on this kind of operations, being confronted with cheating and faking day by day? Doesn’t sound like a fullfilling job to me, regardless of how much money you could make with this.
37. Someone...

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:16 pm

Well, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t agree with me in saying it’s you who stirred up the controversy on this one. You wrote it.
38. dad

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:18 pm

again, i still do not understand what triggers Dan to post an article like this. What is he looking for? looking for humiliation? or he is tired of his life, he just want to ruin it?

is this the quality of those so called “stanford” elite?
39. Dan Ackerman Greenberg

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:18 pm

Beyond commenting back and forth to make the comment thread more interesting on each video, what exactly do you guys find so morally wrong here?

Dan
40. dad

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:19 pm

and for MA, how the hell can this happen? having some post going out but you have no idea of? or you are playing the viral with Dan?
41. Travis Dent

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:21 pm

I can’t believe the responses to this so far. Do you really think companies limit themselves morally when it comes to marketing a product? If they can pay someone like Dan to guarantee the success of their campaign, why wouldn’t they?

Really interesting article, thanks for writing it. I agree with Michael about the plugs to his company though, just a little trashy.
42. dad

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:21 pm

this is another unprofessional post on TC next to the other “life blogging” dude who yelled at the theater.. dun even wanna mention his name.
43. Someone...

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:23 pm

Hmm, let’s see… Paying bloggers to post the videos, misleading titles, deleting (more than likely honest) comments who’s views you don’t agree with, spamming the video on forums and other sites… Just to start with.
44. Tom

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:23 pm

I don’t know if I can read the comments properly for all the high horses that seem to be cluttered around.

Dan, I found the article really informative and I’m sure you’re going to continue to get a lot of business from the big players in the future. You run a marketing firm - this is how you market in 2007. You’re not running a church or a kindergarten or a charity - you’re running a marketing operation. Everyone needs to take off the rose colored glasses.
45. Danny

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm

What is the logic behind publishing this? To attract more chancers? If I was a client I wouldn’t be happy (particularly when some details - like the movie bit - Clovertown - seem identifiable), if I was a competitor then you’ve told me your secrets and if I was YouTube I’d look for ways to deflate some of these tricks. All in all a clever, sad little “profession”.
46. Jesse

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm

I wonder how many of these comments are employees from his office “creating controversy”, haha.
47. Emma

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm

so basically this guy is a spammer!
48. missing the picture

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm

“Michael you got it exactly right. I have a small startup company that would benefit from a viral video but I would never work with a company that lacks integrity.”

i think you’re missing the point. this post has less to do with comotion group and more to do with the problems of youtube. let’s be real here, dan’s company probably isn’t the only one doing this, but IT IS the only one admitting to doing so. sure, knowing how youtube gaming works may taint your experience of viewing a viral video… but who cares? it’s a stupid little video that may grab 2 minutes of your attention, but probably not.

youtube gaming has existed for years. other forms of “viral marketing” that closely resembles spam has existed for years (look at myspace and how they got big). the internet is going to be gamed: let go of your idealism.
49. Juso

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:25 pm

Please, please don’t pay MA to remove our comments.
50. Someone...

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:27 pm

Some moral standards != rose colored glasses.
51. Reinier

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:27 pm

I’m sure this “method” works, and that it will give the videos an enormous boost in views and engagement. But when the companies involved in this kind of “marketing” are discovered it will backfire in their faces. Big time.

The one thing we have learned from the internet is that integrity is the most valuable thing for customers nowadays. Good luck, while it lasts…
52. Tom

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:27 pm

Dan, if you dig any deeper into that hole you’ve created for yourself, you’ll soon reach the other side of the Earth.

The worst part (thinking of you personally) might be you’ve admitted to spamming your own friends, and you think it’s a good thing.
53. Adoption Michigan

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:28 pm

Did not know there was such a thing as black hat video spamming.
54. Basil

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:28 pm

Dan, we tend to trust the sites we use to prevent people like you from monetizing our attention. That’s what’s morally wrong here. You game the system for your own benefit and don’t give anything back.
55. Laurent

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:29 pm

It’s sad the wild west days are gone, but this should have been expected. It’s just marketing.
56. DIGG THIS POST

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:30 pm

DIGG IT:

http://digg.com/tech_news/The_.....ral_Videos
57. Fry

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:31 pm

I love the controversy in the comments - there’s nothing like a heated argument to keep me coming back for more!

Hang on…
58. Tom

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:33 pm

OK people, you do realize that Dan’s not killing kittens or anything, he’s just promoting 30 second videos?

Sheez…
59. Thermal Pollution

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:33 pm

Looking at the number of Diggs, this post did ring a bell.
60. EOT

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:34 pm

Although I do not endorse acts like this, I do feel that we should give Dan credit for being honest, and sharing his know-how.

They (Dan’s biz) are not the first and definitely not the last to pose as users in forums etc. to generate interest in their stuffs.

I’ve read about something similar from big entertainment companies who hire dudes to get all excited about their products in public forums. This is just something that we have to live with.

The savvy user will have to take a stand as to whether he/she will use this knowledge for “good” or “evil”.

Bottom line: take everything with a grain of salt.
61. Someone...

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:35 pm

By using spam and bait and switch tactics. I suppose if you like spam, or clicking links that aren’t really what they say, that wouldn’t bother you too much…
62. Training Day Movie

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:35 pm

Perfect post for controversy.
63. gary gonzales

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:37 pm

This is just WRONG, and we wonder why some startups are buired and others thrive. The trickery of the system.

I know Micheal is pissed at this, but its only when these kinds of business are exposed that we all benefit?
64. Jimmy

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:38 pm

Spam is what is decreasing the relevancy of Youtube. Spam on the thumbnail (misleading pic), spam keywords, spam comments, etc. Is spam the new viral?

What’s next? TC posts a post about how autogenerated spam sites provide a tons of ‘viral’ customers or that spam email generates ‘viral’ leads?
65. uski

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:44 pm

It is possible that this post is actually part of some viral marketing.
But it’s truly disgusting, particularly because this post promotes spam.
66. Kim Curtis

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:44 pm

The name of his company is “The Comotion Group” - what do you expect?
67. awesome

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:44 pm

www.myemergencycardkit.com

send him a card to tell him how disgusted you are!
68. rico

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:49 pm

As someone who works in advertising, I find this absolutely fascinating. I think what Dan has done is very clever and it’s rather funny that people are so upset by it.

i know a lot of people would like to keep their youtube experience pure - heaven forbid their viewing of cat videos and snl skits be tainted by marketing, but don’t get angry just because someone figured out how to make money in a creative way.
69. Thom

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:50 pm

Are you all so naive to assume that popular things in everyday life would be just as popular without marketing and in a bigger sense, the desire to make money, behind them? Come on, wake up.

(Or is someone creating a fake controversy here in order to push the popularity of this post? LOL)
70. Jan Martin

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:51 pm

Guys,

Everything in this article is obvious. I don’t see how any of this is news.
71. nicomo

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:51 pm

Hi Dan,
Didn’t you just shoot yourself in the foot here? If it’s all about marketing, won’t your clients have second thoughts about contracting with a guy who will do dirty tricks for them, sure… but then out them just like you did?
72. Coolite

November 22nd, 2007 at 1:52 pm

They (Dan + Arrington ) are playing you all like fiddle. I can’t believe how gullible people are.

Why do you think for a second that this whole blog post has not been formulated (orchestrated really) from the start to create a controversy. What does Dan and his company do for a living?

“A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video.”

Replace “video” with “blog” above.

I image this is how it all started…

Dan just ‘happens’ to bump into Mike somewhere. Maybe the Orange party? huh, do you think? Dan is (obviously) good at getting peoples attention. He leads Mike down the path. Then the close…

[DAN] hey, I just had a great idea. How about we do something with a post on your site.

[MIKE] brilliant. I’ll make sure to post a comment near the top that stirs the pot a bit. Then I’ll do something to keep people checking back to see what I have to say.

Ya. That’s pretty much how this all went down.

We’ll see how long this comment lasts. To quote Dan…

“Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.”

Comment by Brent Goodman on November 23, 2007 at 8:53pm

WHY I AM POSTING THIS
someone messaged me saying I just ripped off the article from TechCrunch and they were going to notify them... blah blah blah

These people have too much time on their hands obviously.

The original links to the post and url are in the very first post so full credit is given.

If they delete the article from TechCrunch, as may happen, then what I have really done is PRESERVED some valuable work.

Hey, I'm kinda one of those historic preservationist types! So anyway if you were going to message me about the copyright issue, save your not so valuable time for other endevours.

BG

Comment by Brent Goodman on November 23, 2007 at 8:48pm

November 22 2007
The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos
Dan Ackerman Greenberg
386 comments »

This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June.

Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.

When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views.

Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos.

Secret #1: Not all viral videos are what they seem

There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day (I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t care how “viral” you think your video is; no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it.

The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients give us videos and we make them go viral. Our rule of thumb is that if we don’t get a video 100,000 views, we don’t charge.

So far, we’ve worked on 80-90 videos and we’ve seen overwhelming success. In the past 3 months, we’ve achieved over 20 million views for our clients, with videos ranging from 100,000 views to upwards of 1.5 million views each. In other words, not all videos go viral organically – there is a method to the madness.

I can’t reveal our clients’ names and I can’t link to the videos we’ve worked on, because YouTube surely doesn’t like what we’re doing and our clients hate to admit that they need professional help with their “viral” videos. But I can give you a general idea of who we’ve worked with: two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, a variety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international.

This summer, we were approached by a Hollywood movie studio and asked to help market a series of viral clips they had created in advance of a blockbuster. The videos were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and CGI. Needless to say, the studio had invested a significant amount of money in creating the videos but every time they put them online, they couldn’t get more than a few thousand views.

We took six videos and achieved:

* 6 million views on YouTube
* ~30,000 ratings
* ~10,000 favorites
* ~10,000 comments
* 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
* All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were #1 and #2 Most Viewed of the Week.

The following principles were the secrets to our success.

2. Content is NOT King

If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people to watch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is not necessary to get 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.

Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t agonize over determining the best “viral” video possible. Generally, a concept should not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should be fit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines we follow:

* Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
* Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
* Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
* Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
* Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
* Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

These recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral “ads” pointing people back to websites:

* Model Falls in Hole on Runway
* Cheerleader Gets Run Over By Football Team
* PacMan: The Chase
* Dude
* Dog Drives Car
* Snowball – Dancing Cockatoo

3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page

Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?

The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.

If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! And the higher up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get.

So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

* Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
* Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
* MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
* Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
* Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
* Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.

4. Title Optimization

Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?

It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”

5. Thumbnail Optimization

If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

Also, when we feel particularly creative, we optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.

See the highlighted videos in the screenshot below for a good example of how a compelling title and screenshot can make all the difference once the video is on the Most Viewed page.

6. Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section - especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since most people watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

7. Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do we keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

A lot of the time our clients say: “We’ve got 5 videos and we’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If we have multiple videos, we post all of them at once. If someone sees our first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would we make them wait until we post the next one? We give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. We don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Once our first video is done, we delete our second video then re-upload it. Now we have another 48-hour window to push it to the Most Viewed page. Rinse and repeat. Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole

This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.

I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

9. Metrics/Tracking: How we measure effectiveness

The following is how we measure the success of our viral videos.

For one, we tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.

Conclusion

The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.

Comment by Brent Goodman on November 23, 2007 at 8:47pm

# Michael Arrington

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:25 pm

I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

# Michael Arrington

November 22nd, 2007 at 12:29 pm

I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.

Comment by Brent Goodman on November 23, 2007 at 8:45pm

There is huge debate (386 comments) on techcrunch about this article. Michael Arrington says he is... well, I'll just post his comment... anyway, it looks like the entire article may get pulled which would be a loss, regardless of people's opinions.

The fact is, this is how video goes viral, it is entirely engineered and strategic. Regardless of ethics, this IS how it's done, so if you would like to be educated about this, the article is there to be read.

Since it may get pulled, I'm going to post it in it's entirety here, so people can still read it.

B.G.