It has become increasingly popular for artists to be ranked by their YouTube view counts. This article is written to help my readers best utilize their loyal fan-base.
Understanding the System
YouTube is no new kid on the block when it comes to “spammers”. They’ve had to combat a lot of “artificial views” brought on by a lot of over-enthusiastic viewers. So they’ve developed techniques to combat view count spamming (YouTube View Count Announcement). For the most part, they want to ensure that whoever views their videos is a real-world individual and not some script or robot, which is understandable.
Definition of a View
If an individual hits the video, and watches the video for more than 50% of its duration, it’s considered a view. If the individual hits the webpage repeatedly, any view beyond his first is not counted.
Web identification of an Individual
For the most part, an individual is identified by their IP address on the web. At the time of writing, no matter how you slice it, you’re going to have a hard time discerning multiple entities are the same individual if he has multiple IP addresses.
How to Increase YouTube View Counts
Tiny Urls
Your viewers might have multiple means of accessing your web content, friend’s computer, school computer, home computer, work computer, library’s computer, cellphone, and etc. You might as well make it easier for them to have a short URL to type into their device than the long one that YouTube gives you. This is where Tiny URL comes in (Tiny URL).
Tiny URL is a web service that takes a full URL, shortens it, and provides you with the shortened version. Which you can then use on the web to refer to your content.
In-network marketing
You want to invite all your friends to help you, and you want them to invite all their friends and so on. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are all popular mediums to accomplish this goal. What you want to do is go online and find some bookmarklet to allow you to easily invite all your friends and allow your friends to easily invite their friends to your activity. I won’t go into great detail but one example is Facebook.
On Facebook, you can create events, which you can invite all your friends to. Then have your friends invite their friends and so on. Facebook has made it insanely painful to invite your friends, I guess to thwart spammers, unfortunately, you have gotten caught in the cross-fire. Fortunately, bookmarkelets, easily reusuable and bookmarkable Javascript code, has come to the rescue. For example the following webpage links to a site that provides a clever little bookmarklet that can invite all your friends.
(Invite All Facebook Friends Bookmarklet)
Informed Fans
An artist is only as strong as his fans. The more able his or her fans are, the more able he or she is. For the most part, make sure your fans are aware of all the ways they can increase your view count (See Tiny URL section). The fans might have the enthusiasm, but not the means, this way, they can have both.
If you follow the steps listed above, then you have effectively utilized your fan-base, and the rest are in the hands of the greater powers.
The Dark Side: Hacking YouTube to artificially boast your view count
If you’re a decent computer nerd, and you’ve read this article, you know what you need to do…