Christopher Herot's Weblog

How to Make Your Video Viral - or- The First Law of Holes

In a guest post on TechCrunch, Stanford grad student Dan Ackerman Greenberg offered a fascinating expose of techniques for promoting videos on YouTube.  Some are obvious, some are clever and some are downright sleazy.

Obvious:

• Make it short.
• Design for remixing, e.g. Dramatic Hamster.
• Don't make it an outright ad unless it;s as clever as the one for Sony Bravia.
• Make it shocking.
• Use fake headlines.
• Appeal to sex.
• Share the video with your friends on Facebook.
• Set up a Facebook event to promote your video.
• Send the video to a mailing list.
• Tell all your friends and get them to email and share it on Facebook.
• Pick a catchy thumbnail, preferably with a human face in it.

Clever:

• Make sure the frame in the exact middle of the video is eye-catching, since it will be one of the three grabbed by YouTube.
• Change the thumbnail every few hours.
• If you have more than one video, release all of them simultaneously instead of dribbling them out one at a time.
• Pick unique tags for al you videos so they will show up in each other's "related" lists.

The sleazy:

• Pay bloggers to post embedded videos.
• Have your own employees to set up multiple accounts on a forum and start fake conversations with each other.
• Delete negative comments that others make.
• Embed videos in the comments section of people's MySpace pages
• Use a misleading title, with terms such as “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”
• Use an image of a half-naked woman in the thumbnail.
• Once the 48 hour window for "most viewed" expires, delete the video and reload it.

The original post provoked an uproar from people shocked that such things went on (515 comments last time I looked).  Greenburg, in apparent ignorance of the First Law on Holes (When in one, stop digging) tried to "clarify" his intentions to say that he didn't personally engage in or endorse the tactics he described.  I'll leave that to the investigative journalists to discover, but he did do all of us a favor by providing such an extensive catalog of techniques, some of which we can use and all of which we should be aware.

Humble Beginnings Panel at TechCrunch40

At TechCrunch40 this morning, Michael Moritz interviewed Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Loudcloud, Opsware, Ning), David Filo, (Yahoo) and Chad Hurley (YouTube) about their experiences and advice for the entrepreneurs in the audience.   What was striking was how modest their expectations were in the early days of what ultimately became billion dollar companies.  Marc Andreessen said his primary ambition was to get out of the midwest when he moved to California.  At the time he joined Netscape no one had any idea that there was a way to make money on the Internet.  Similarly, David Filo and Jerry Yang were bored with graduate school and started Yahoo in their spare time.   No one had any idea how they were going to make money, as web-based advertising had yet to be invented.  Chad Hurley and his two partners started YouTube to solve some problems they had and build the first version in a few months.

Marc Andreessen pointed out that a startup needs an idea that is "crazy enough" that no established company is already doing it.  He also pointed out that 999 of every 1,000 such ideas really are crazy.  Thus, he too recommends starting out with something the entrepreneurs would use themselves.

On the question of what tips they would give to entrepreneurs:

• Make sure one of the founders can be a CEO, since hiring an outsider is very risky.  (Andreessen)
• Don't hire too quickly - wait until you have a product-market fit.  That keeps the burn low (Andreessen) and makes the company more nimble (Hurley).
• Look at how you are using the product yourself.  (Hurley)
• Attract people who are passionate about the space the company is in.  (Filo).

As much as all the panelists agreed on the idea of staying small, the one regret they have is that with the hindsight of seeing how fast they would grow, that they should have hired faster.

Philippe Dauman at D

When Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube were on the stage at D, they responded to a question on copyrights and their relationship with the content owners by repeating the oft-told story about how they will often get a video uploaded by a publicity department and then some time later a cease-and-desist letter from the same company's legal department.  Sure enough, we saw that process in action when Viacom President and CEO, Philippe Dauman took the stage.  His talk was preceded by a hilarious video from Viacom talent Stephen Colbert.  According to D organizers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Dauman gave them permission to post the video on their web site.  However, by the time we came back from the break, Walt and Kara announced that the Viacom lawyers had already called and asked them to take it down.

UPDATE:  Kara and Walt said it was all a misunderstanding.  The video is back.

Youtube's Perfect Timing

There has been much speculation on the reasons for YouTube's spectacular growth, even while competing against services such as Google Video and MSN Video which started earlier or have deeper pockets.  While I agree that YouTube has a nice clean user experience, facilitates sharing, and just plain works well (in contrast to, say, Comedy Central's own overloaded site), one of the key reasons they caught on is their fortuitous timing with respect to the posting of copyright material.

While the bulk of the material that is posted and viewed on the site is consumer-generated, what put YouTube on the map was posting the Lazy Sunday video from Saturday Night Live.   During the interval before NBC demanded its removal, people passed the link around to their friends and the YouTube community took off.  The entertainment industry, which up to this point had been quick to sue anyone who used its content without permission, took note of the promotional value of exposure on the internet.  YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley told The Hollywood Reporter "There's been a few examples of marketing departments uploading content directly to the site, while on the other side of the company their attorney is demanding we remove this content."

A few years ago, YouTube might have been sued into oblivion.  Mark Cuban still thinks it may happen.  However, with the possibe exception of Universal Music Group, the entertainment companies have been content with sending YouTube DMCA Takedown Notices and simultaneously negotiating for a percentage of the ad revenues when they materialize.  They have announced that they are developing technology that will track copyrighted material as it is uploaded and viewed, although the details have yet to be announced.  One potential sticking point is how to compensate artists for incidental use of music in consumer-generated videos where there may be multiple, overlapping rights.  Cuban thinks this problem will be the death of YouTube and even lead Hollywood to lobby for further legislation, but it may also be the beginning of the end of that model of intellectual property.