YouTube Annotations do.
For those out there who presume - as I naively did before starting to observe the Snowball - that YouTube is exclusively for posting light-hearted or incredible things like skateboarding dogs
Skateboarding dog with over 10 million views
...or pranking your gullible wife into doing something silly
A man who has way more views than he deserves, not to mention a wife he doesn't deserve
...I must let you in on the YouTube Viral Video Secret I've discovered!
YouTube videos have FLASH LAYERS. One of them is the video file, itself. The layer directly on top of it is a flash layer into which you can easily add an ANNOTATION - kinda like a POST-SCRIPT NOTE to your video in case you - unlike me - are not a kickass video editor and want to make a quick correction or a little callout to someone or even a link to other content on YouTube or elsewhere.
Here's how to annotate.
A hilarious comedian known as Phil DeFranco, PhillyD, or "sxephil" is an internet celebrity (No, they really do exist) who takes advantage of this technology to make his THRICE-WEEKLY VIDEOS qualify as instantly viral and exposes a great secret to making your videos go viral. He annotates a LINK TO THE PREVIOUS VIDEO and a LINK TO THE FOLLOWING VIDEO.
Most Recent PhillyD Show
Every episode of the PhillyD is hilarious, but then so is my dearly-beloved We Got That B-Roll (click) Video and a sister video also made by comedic troupe "Cream" called Sinus Rinse Addiction (click). And yet my Sergey videos don't generate as much as a tenth of the traffic that PhillyD does.
Why? I have a theory...
Phil-philes like myself only watch Philly DeFranco once in a while but when we do, we can't get enough with a single 5-minute episode so we allow ourselves to be suckered into the convenient buttons that take you to the following or previous video. Amused, we can't help but eventually either comment, rate or forward, embed and link to his videos where people can also rate, comment and embed/link. So, using your own video to promote your other videos in order to leverage advantage of the fact that if someone is looking at your YouTube Video, now, then they have subconsciously alotted at least an hour to waste on the internet because their wife is napping or their boss has taken up golf on Wednesday mornings or something.
Clever, sxephil! Clever!
What do we learn from being "Phil'd in" by sxephil?
1. Produce a SERIES OF VIDEOS, not just one video.
2. ANNOTATE LINKS betwixt your series of videos.
3. Make the content of the videos EPISODIC by posing it as a show and not posting all of the videos at once.
One day, there will be chips implanted into our brains that calculate what we want and serve it up on the screen in front of us and become the ultimate ruin of our species.
Until then, the Snowball rolls on.
Shameless self-promotion - Joe Rawlins is a partner with in LizardLand Video www.lizardlandvideo.com the Premier Phoenix Video production firm.
Joe
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