Update: Dan has a follow up to this post, here.
This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June.
Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.
When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy – videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. – videos with millions and millions of views.
Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos.
Secret #1: Not all viral videos are what they seem
There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day (I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t care how “viral” you think your video is; no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it.
The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients give us videos and we make them go viral. Our rule of thumb is that if we don’t get a video 100,000 views, we don’t charge.
So far, we’ve worked on 80-90 videos and we’ve seen overwhelming success. In the past 3 months, we’ve achieved over 20 million views for our clients, with videos ranging from 100,000 views to upwards of 1.5 million views each. In other words, not all videos go viral organically – there is a method to the madness.
I can’t reveal our clients’ names and I can’t link to the videos we’ve worked on, because YouTube surely doesn’t like what we’re doing and our clients hate to admit that they need professional help with their “viral” videos. But I can give you a general idea of who we’ve worked with: two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, a variety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international.
This summer, we were approached by a Hollywood movie studio and asked to help market a series of viral clips they had created in advance of a blockbuster. The videos were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and CGI. Needless to say, the studio had invested a significant amount of money in creating the videos but every time they put them online, they couldn’t get more than a few thousand views.
We took six videos and achieved:
- 6 million views on YouTube
- ~30,000 ratings
- ~10,000 favorites
- ~10,000 comments
- 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
- All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were #1 and #2 Most Viewed of the Week.
The following principles were the secrets to our success.
2. Content is NOT King
If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people to watch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is not necessary to get 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.
Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t agonize over determining the best “viral” video possible. Generally, a concept should not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should be fit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines we follow:
- Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
- Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
- Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
- Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
- Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
- Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”
These recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral “ads” pointing people back to websites:
- Model Falls in Hole on Runway
- Cheerleader Gets Run Over By Football Team
- PacMan: The Chase
- Dude
- Dog Drives Car
- Snowball – Dancing Cockatoo
3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page
Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?
The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.
If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! And the higher up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get.
So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?
- Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
- Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
- MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
- Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
- Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
- Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.
Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.
4. Title Optimization
Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?
It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”
5. Thumbnail Optimization
If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.
YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.
Also, when we feel particularly creative, we optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.
See the highlighted videos in the screenshot below for a good example of how a compelling title and screenshot can make all the difference once the video is on the Most Viewed page.
6. Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself
Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section – especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.
Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.
We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since most people watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.
7. Releasing all videos simultaneously
Once people are watching a video, how do we keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?
A lot of the time our clients say: “We’ve got 5 videos and we’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”
This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If we have multiple videos, we post all of them at once. If someone sees our first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would we make them wait until we post the next one? We give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. We don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.
Once our first video is done, we delete our second video then re-upload it. Now we have another 48-hour window to push it to the Most Viewed page. Rinse and repeat. Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.
8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole
This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.
I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.
So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”
When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.
9. Metrics/Tracking: How we measure effectiveness
The following is how we measure the success of our viral videos.
For one, we tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.
TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.
Conclusion
The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.
Violation of Youtube POS, wouldn’t you say?
Pretty unethical, I would say, as one who grew up with a sense of ethics. Paying bloggers to post videos? Having your staff post phony comments? Those are the kind of tactics that give PR a black eye.
Thanks for pulling back the curtain on all of this and leveling the playing field. But now that all these strategies are public (and I assume not as useful anymore), when are you going to write about the REAL Secret Strategies?
Most of this information is old hat and against TOS, but there are a few good nuggets in here if you look.
If anyone is looking for is for help in making and distributing viral videos …please contact us at http://www.productionboys.com
TOS
I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.
This post is a great example of bubble logic: “The echo chamber tells you what to copy.”
I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.
Misleading titles, creating fake user accounts and talking to themselves, deleting comments they don’t like, paying bloggers to post videos … what a great company that would be to work for, I can’t imagine why anyone (knowingly) would use them, with all of the “fake” views the videos get because of them.
It is a misleading strategy but one people definitely use. Using the wrong keywords or putting an attractive woman in for no reason might get the video hits but a lot of those people will be clicking off right away. You have to ask yourself what you really want, as many views as possible no matter if they watch it or not, or views by people who are truly interested. If you ask me nothing replaces word of mouth. Tell people about it in person, over email, post on message boards, subscribe to similar YouTube channels. Just do the legwork and it will get some views. Like the guy says fire your PR firm and do it yourself.
“Fake” views aren’t an issue if you’re tracking the click-through count. Plus the “fake” views are views after all.
Michael,
Really appreciate your honesty here. There are few who would comment so openly about their own blog.
But it raises a KEY question. It seems this article went into “press” without you knowing about it? That’s bizarre!
Or in other words, seems like there is no editorial process at TechCrunch. If that is the case, should we (the readers) trust the authenticity of the facts listed in TechCrunch blog?
Thanks,
Mike
Wow that was a very enlightening and insightful article, thank you for writing that!!
lol, the founder and editor of a very popular blog doesn’t even know whos writing what.
Fantastic article
Michael you got it exactly right. I have a small startup company that would benefit from a viral video but I would never work with a company that lacks integrity.
So basically it’s all about using various forms of spam? Classy.
What next, an article on how to make money from stock market scams and flogging dodgy pills?
The first two links give me 404s anyhow, so I suppose it’s sort of similar to not having them there
Oh well, I for one am happy that was published, as it was a very interesting read!
My god, the interweb is so contrived. You have really opened my eyes.
I will never view online videos the same way again. I heard this guy was the creative force behind Star wars kid as well on a covert mission to a Montreal high school a few years back. As a matter of fact I have seen his image in random pictures through time where something spontaneously went viral. Wait, isn’t he actually “the doctor”?
I can’t say that it wasn’t an interesting read, but still it’s still bait and switch and other low ball techniques used to make the stuff popular.
“I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.”
You guys and Scoble do this constantly for Valley startups. Pellleeaasseee.
Wow! It was one hell of an interesting post! Thanx!
I just can’t figure out why he would post something like this…:S
Quick response:
What we do is grease the viral wheels. If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares? It’s all about entertainment – we’re just making the whole experience entertaining, not just the video itself.
Dan
Love it or hate it, these things really work amazingly well no doubt. So obvious and yet it had never crossed my mind,
I don’t see how giving a little misleading info can violate anything, how many adverts have you all seen on tv and genuinely thought it was on about something else,
like for instance an advert featuring top of the range sports cars, only it turns out to be an advert for coffee!! surely this is just a similar thing, its just gripping others attention,
yeah, maybe the majority of those who click on your video maybe be annoyed and click straight off, but on average there will always be those few who won’t care that the title was misleading as their attention will turn to the video you’ve presented to them,
they’ll forget what they were ever looking for and suddenly they are listening to your latest music release, etc.
overall I think it’s a very clever idea and it helps to promote people who don’t have access to huge advertising budgets,
When a company places an advert on TV, they know full well that not everyone who see’s it is going to be a potential customer, but do they care, no, because they know that someone will se it who is interested in their product and thats all that matters.
Thanks for a great post
Wow that comment is worse then the post.
And how does commenting back and forth between (fake) users, regardless of the video’s content, help make the experience entertaining?
Dan you are an idiot.
I didn’t know Stanford had a “Spamming 101″ class
From LinkedIn:
Notable clients include: 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros Records, Fox Atomic, Walden Media, Yari Film Group, Nike, Oakley, …
Wish we had had these tips during our video promotion last year.
Sounds like an intra-office viral campaign
I am also disgusted by this.
I am also surprised it went up without further review, but then I don’t know much about the editorial flow at TechCrunch. However that does not imply that there isn’t one.
I’ve seen semi-shilly posts on TechCrunch before and they’re usually up front about it, fully disclosing any personal interests. They’re also usually still interesting. This was interesting too, which I’d argue is a reason to publish it here.
Interesting and disgusting. Carry on!
Of course, Dan. Who would care about a little fraud in pursuit of a buck? I mean, as long as it moves the goods, there’s nothing wrong with fooling the populace.
Idiot. The reason your trickery is necessary that your venal predecessors in advertising have burned their credibility in other media already. And now here you are, a leech on a new medium, feeding off the trust that other people have built up. Pathetic.
I can’t help but note you don’t provide a single verifiable fact about your business above. The simple assumption is that you lie to your clients just as glibly as you lie to the general public. If fake videos and fake comments, why not fake views, fake click-throughs, and fake campaign success? I’m sure it pays just as well.
>>If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares?
I care. Anyone who manages an online community cares. You’re bringing a commercial interest into a shared space under false pretenses. How is that not spam?
How do we know that “Dan” isn’t just creating all this controversy with his own “posting back and forth” technique?
weird.
very insightful and I can’t wait to try some of the strategies. How can you compete when everyone else, and I mean everyone else, is doing this?
Dan, between SUPost and this you seem to have a great eye for picking startups that really have their morals in the right place….
Can’t wait to hear Arrington’s reply. Should be interesting.
Hmmmm…I wonder if they’re posting things in the comment section here to try to be controversial and engage more users…
People are always going to find a way around/manipulate things to their own advantage. Ethics aside, I thought it was well done and I imagine many videos producers will use these tricks now
unethical,
wrong,
dishonorable,
immoral,
debauched,
degenerate,
degraded,
dissipated,
dissolute,
libertine,
profligate,
riotous,
disgraceful,
scandalous,
shameful,
shocking,
scrofulous.
One word: Ingenious
Wish I had thought of this before, great post Dan, thanks for sharing
Duck Bill – seems to me like Mike is actually the one inspiring the controversy here….
Definitely an interesting article but Dan, are you happy having built your business model on this kind of operations, being confronted with cheating and faking day by day? Doesn’t sound like a fullfilling job to me, regardless of how much money you could make with this.
Well, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t agree with me in saying it’s you who stirred up the controversy on this one. You wrote it.
again, i still do not understand what triggers Dan to post an article like this. What is he looking for? looking for humiliation? or he is tired of his life, he just want to ruin it?
is this the quality of those so called “stanford” elite?
Beyond commenting back and forth to make the comment thread more interesting on each video, what exactly do you guys find so morally wrong here?
Dan
and for MA, how the hell can this happen? having some post going out but you have no idea of? or you are playing the viral with Dan?
http://www.yout...IAX8&fmt=22
watch meeeeeeee
I can’t believe the responses to this so far. Do you really think companies limit themselves morally when it comes to marketing a product? If they can pay someone like Dan to guarantee the success of their campaign, why wouldn’t they?
Really interesting article, thanks for writing it. I agree with Michael about the plugs to his company though, just a little trashy.
this is another unprofessional post on TC next to the other “life blogging” dude who yelled at the theater.. dun even wanna mention his name.
Hmm, let’s see… Paying bloggers to post the videos, misleading titles, deleting (more than likely honest) comments who’s views you don’t agree with, spamming the video on forums and other sites… Just to start with.
I don’t know if I can read the comments properly for all the high horses that seem to be cluttered around.
Dan, I found the article really informative and I’m sure you’re going to continue to get a lot of business from the big players in the future. You run a marketing firm – this is how you market in 2007. You’re not running a church or a kindergarten or a charity – you’re running a marketing operation. Everyone needs to take off the rose colored glasses.
What is the logic behind publishing this? To attract more chancers? If I was a client I wouldn’t be happy (particularly when some details – like the movie bit – Clovertown – seem identifiable), if I was a competitor then you’ve told me your secrets and if I was YouTube I’d look for ways to deflate some of these tricks. All in all a clever, sad little “profession”.
I wonder how many of these comments are employees from his office “creating controversy”, haha.
so basically this guy is a spammer!
“Michael you got it exactly right. I have a small startup company that would benefit from a viral video but I would never work with a company that lacks integrity.”
i think you’re missing the point. this post has less to do with comotion group and more to do with the problems of youtube. let’s be real here, dan’s company probably isn’t the only one doing this, but IT IS the only one admitting to doing so. sure, knowing how youtube gaming works may taint your experience of viewing a viral video… but who cares? it’s a stupid little video that may grab 2 minutes of your attention, but probably not.
youtube gaming has existed for years. other forms of “viral marketing” that closely resembles spam has existed for years (look at myspace and how they got big). the internet is going to be gamed: let go of your idealism.
Please, please don’t pay MA to remove our comments.
Some moral standards != rose colored glasses.