Tuesday 22 January 2013

That's Life!

It’s been another traumatic week of video view culling on our various internet video platforms… I'm not going to whinge... Dailymotion culled 32,000 views off the original ‘cutbacks’ channel.  Youtube culled 27,000 views off my old ‘castopani’ channel, and 2,400 views off ‘rinkytv’. A few weeks ago, I was shocked by such 'adjustments'. Now, I realise that important lessons must be learned from these random and apparently unexplained culls. The yahoo News article below quotes ‘Youtube Video marketing expert’ David Jenyns...

“As part of their terms of service, YouTube is likely to continue de-spamming data to keep their statistics as accurate as possible. But, those of us who publish videos with the audience’s best interest at heart, and don't employ external businesses to falsely bolster watch counts, aren’t likely to be affected at all.”

This is a rather sycophantic misrepresentation, lumping honest Youtubers in with spammers, hackers and ‘fake’ views. The reality is that lifetime channel views are now being differentiated from what’s being described as ‘active’ video views. In the past, some of us (naively) deleted successful videos in order to keep our internet video channels ‘fresh’. Now we’re losing credit for those fairly earned historical views. A simple option would be for Youtubers to be able to select ‘video views’ or ‘lifetime views’ on their channel frontpage (I'm not holding my breath in anticipation).

The main lesson is that internet video as a medium changes every hour.  The next lesson is that IP producers do not and will never control internet video! It’s a no-brainer, but there’s a huge flaw in our ‘internet video is the future of broadcasting’ optimism.  The flaw is that platforms like Youtube and Dailymotion are (of course) running the show, treating IP producers like so many parasites who are just along for the ride! The internet video platforms are controlling revenue, information, stats, procedures and access to audiences in the same ways that tv broadcast companies did in the past, except now the system is working at light speed! Our future resembles our past, except much faster! SEO is the way forward! That’s life!
 Interesting times!

In the meantime, here's 'Enda Kenny Worse Than Herod', although killbotone suggests that Enda's now becoming 'worse than Cowen'! How times change! Or, same old, same old?


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