If you ever see a video, and you’re like “Why is this watch next recommendation from YouTube so crappy?!”, then you should fill out this form for bad watch next suggestions.
If you ever see a video, and you’re like “Holy crap, it’s like I’m watching a dithered display from 2002 in here; these blocky artifacts are terrible!”, then you should fill out this form for bad video quality.
Feel free to pass these on.
It seems like my 15 minutes of fame are mostly coming to a close. I’m still getting some 6000 hits/hour, but it’s nowhere near what it was — it peaked at over 130000 hits/hour right after the Daily Mail published their article. All of the other metrics have died down as well — Twitter posts, news articles, textual abuse at the hands of Joe Rogan and Anthony Cumia fans…
As some of you have seen, it’s my intent to donate advertising revenues from the video on YouTube to the Massachusetts Audubon Society. (Just seemed like a good cause to me; I don’t generally believe in advertising for padding my own pockets, but I’m happy to use advertising for good — and frankly, I’ve always wondered how advertising on YouTube worked, so this seemed like as good of an opportunity as any.) As you may have seen in my tweets, a couple of bogus ContentID claims have resulted in some of that revenue/earnings being missed out on: when a video is being disputed under ContentID, *nobody* can run ads, which means that the revenue is lost.
All the stats below are based on rough estimates of views from the YouTube views analytics dashboard combined with a timeline of activity; none are based on any AdSense data.
A brief summary of my monetization history:
I don’t actually have any real earnings statistics yet, because those things can take up to 7 days to process. (I also don’t know if I could share them if I did have them; a quick read of the ToS suggests probably not.) A quick Google search points to this article on YouTube CPM, but explains that it varies significantly depending on what your ratios are of videos getting pre-rolls. (With the vast number of embeds, and short content, I think it’s probably fair to think I’ll have a lower TrueView/skippable ad ratio than most videos would, but again — no numbers available yet.)
This is by far the most common question I get about my experience: “How much money are you making?” With the numbers I see reported on the internet, I think the answer is that you can expect to see about $2 in revenue for every 1000 views. (55% goes to you, 45% goes to YouTube.) So if I had been running ads on my channel for the entire duration, and had had no ContentID claims, it would be approximately $3500 in ad revenue thus far. With the actual reality of the situation, I’m probably significantly less than that, due to not advertising aggressively at the start, the type of video I actually published, and other issues.
Overall, this is just one component of what has been an eye-opening, thrilling, and exhausting experience. I’ll be doing more write-ups about how things have gone over the coming days and weeks — I can certainly say I’ve learned a lot about what having a viral video looks like, and as might be clear from the opening paragraph, it hasn’t all been sunshine and roses.
This morning, while out flying, a hawk attacked my quadcopter, while flying along the Charles River, in Cambridge.
You can see the video — one of my most popular ever — on YouTube:
Of course, because it’s popular, it also means you can see it in a lot of other places — LiveLeak being a ‘primary’ source of the copyright infringement. (I expect this is LiveLeak’s fault as much as it is YouTube’s fault when random people upload copyrighted crap.) I did find that on LiveLeak, the video claimed to have over 9000 views, compared to the 2000 or so on YouTube.
I’m getting a quick lesson in what happens when you create really popular content: People steal it left and right. 🙂 I’ve already filed two copyright claims against people who reuploaded to YouTube and put ads on it — I guess I’ll also be learning about YouTube’s copyright infringement resolution process.
In the mean time, if you want to check it out, I encourage you to share, like or watch on YouTube, rather than on one of the many clones out there 🙂 There’s only one real thing!
In 2007, I posted a video to YouTube; it was just a 5 minute, silent how-to video showing how to load data that you had in a shapefile, open it in QGIS, style it, export it to a mapfile, and load it into OpenLayers. I’ve given pretty much this exact presentation to groups around the world: from Cape Town, South Africa, to Osaka, Japan, but at the time it was just a quick demo I put together, related to a wiki page: Mapping Your Data, in the OpenLayers wiki.
I hadn’t paid attention to it in forever — I uploaded it to YouTube back in 2007, and I haven’t really thought about it since. So as I’m using YouTube a bit more recently, I actually looked at my analytics… and realized that this video still gets *400 views every month*, with an average of two minutes watched per view.
This means that 20 minutes gets wasted watching this video every day (on average); that is more time than I spend on YouTube in an average week. (Given my new employer, I can imagine that changing somewhat in the near future.)
Amusingly enough, for a long time this wasn’t my most popular video; the OpenLayers video is a bit long, and with no sound, can be a bit of a drag. (The pace of it, even 7 years on, still impresses me though; I spent a whole weekend just going through the motions to get the flow down. It really does work nicely.) My most popular video for a long time was an N95 Accelerometer Demo:
This demo showed the use of a Python script to use the accelerometer and simple 2d graphics to move a ball around the screen. (The Symbian Python APIs for interacting with 2d graphics were terrific, and I wish modern phones had something similarly easy.) In the week after that video launched, it had *1500* views; but it was a flash in the pan, and hasn’t maintained its popularity, getting only 2 watches in the last 30 days. (This video was popular enough that I was invited to join the YouTube monetization program, unlike the OpenLayers video, which was never ‘viral’ enough to get there.)
I’ve never been much of a video guy before — another thing I can see changing — but I’m now putting together some of the videos from my quadcopter flights. Last night, I published my bloopers from the first couple days of flying:
But I guess I can never expect, based on my current views, that anything I do on YouTube will be more popular than a silent video I published about OpenLayers back in 2007.
I guess this really just goes back to: OpenLayers was a unique experience, and is probably the most impressive thing I will actually work on for the benefit of the internet at large… ever.