After getting annihilated for exposing some of the tricks that get normal YouTube videos to go viral, Dan Ackerman Greenberg asked for another word. And we gave it to him. His second effort was much better – he said some people do those things, not him. Readers attacked again, mostly for backpedaling, but not as viciously.
But now he’s really got the messaging down. In a CNN interview that talked about the posts, the 22 year old “marketing guru” sounded much more polished. The interviewer asked no hard questions, and Dan was never forced to talk about the uglier side of his business. Third time’s a charm.
There has been a long held suspicion that many of the very popular, Top viewed Videos on YouTube by Comedians and Music Artists have been aggressively promoted.
You can tell by the quality of those videos. While many are entertaining, they are just NOT that great to have gotten to the point of being the most viewed videos of all time had they not been promoted with big bucks.
We are talking about tens of millions of views.
Possibly, if this gets out of hand, YouTube may institute some algos to filter the success of these strategies – sort of like Google, banning paid links.
When you really think of it, it really is not fair to the masses. It is just plain greed!
Some Marketers insist on making a f-ing buck off of every single outlet possible.
I agree with Silicon Valley. I think this type of back door marketing only adds to the steaming pile of crap that seems to be all over the web now. While I can see Dan’s business model would be attractive to a lot of corporates looking to cash in on viral web video I also think that what Dan’s doing is pretty much the same as spamming people – it doesn’t have to be in your inbox to be labeled spam! What’s next, spraying painting urls on buildings, or writing them on toilet walls? Adding links to videos on to blogs/MySpace pages etc is just as bad in my opinion.
So did that Chocolate Rain guy pay this dude? Now if he had a Pepsi sign hanging on his wall in the background then Id say yeah!
So tay zondig or whatever his name goes to show you don’t have to pay someone to go viral! We have had success with our video http://www.yout...h?v=9-j4-51R2k8 sans hiring help. It’s not millions but we were honored by the French press ( http://tinyurl.com/3yzeo9 & http://tinyurl.com/3xk392 ) finding it and writing some great articles on us!
We annihilated him? Funny, he doesn’t look or sound very annihilated. In fact he seems as rich and successful as he always was.
The people need guidance. Dan provides it. Don’t think of it as thought leaders telling the confused masses what to think, think of it as supply and demand. People need cars, they can’t build them from scratch themselves, so they go to a car showroom. People need opinions and tastes, their minds aren’t complex enough to form their own, so they watch MTV and Fox News, go to church and participate in viral marketing. Forever and ever amen. Dan Greenburg’s just the guy behind the checkout. When you go to buy your bunch of bananas, two pints of milk and a pizza, do you launch into a righteous tirade against the spotty youth behind the counter about how he’s profiting from your basic needs and in the new Banana 2.0 era bananas should all be user-generated and circulated around social banana networks for free? Well, for all I know TechCrunch readers probably do, but I don’t, I just hand over a fiver.
@1: Well I wouldn’t say that virally promoted videos are going to be the best, but given that virtually all of YouTube – at least its user-generated content – consists of a) cats b) dogs c) babies d) grotesquely obese people stuttering their way through nonsense convinced that they’re Samuel f***ing Pepys 2.0, if you spend thousands of dollars promoting a video, then that’s as close a mark of quality as you get. The money behind it shows confidence that the video is at least watchable. More reliable than a five-star rating anyway – videos of people dancing to Insane Clown Posse music can get five stars.
So did that Chocolate Rain guy pay this dude? Now if he had a Pepsi sign hanging on his wall in the background then Id say yeah!
So tay zondig or whatever his name goes to show you don’t have to pay someone to go viral! We have had success with our video http://www.yout...h?v=9-j4-51R2k8 sans hiring help. It’s not millions but we were honored by the French press finding it and writing some awesome articles on us! Thank you
Google translate of a an article
http://www.goog...=en&ie=UTF8
**Please delete my other post(double w/tiny URLs)
i talked to a 17yo kid the other day who for $100 will get you the #1 most viewed vid on youtube. he demonstrated it to me for nothing with some shot of his car. Two hours later, there it was with 150,000 views. So yeah, you can go with Dan wotsit wotsit and his slick sweet talking marketing, or you can pay me $10 and i’ll put you in touch with the kid I know.
The guy really is a marketing genius. At 22 he really deserves the title without the “quotes”.
This is how 99% of the content you consume gets put in front of you – either overtly like the adverts which allow Mike his hypocritical rants about paid posts, or subversively through music ‘top 10′ record charts, or new content that gets introduced into your streaming internet radio feed, or the sponsored opinion on your radio broadcast, or the company that pays gartner for ‘coverage’ which appears in their magic quadrant, or the news story on fox network which slams any anti-war sentiment or….etc etc etc.
Actually its great that you get angry.
If only you could see the irony that you do it in a medium called ‘blogging’ which is the ultimate self serving media invented, right Mike?
Why are you guys pimping a marketer in the first place?
I thought this blog was for IT news?
I’m going to take a wild stab here and say that I doubt that 50% of these comments will be real.
At least spell my name right!
Dan, you’re all right. Keep it going.
For the life of me I still cannot see why this is news to anyone within the sector. The more transparency about who is behind the video’s, the better.
My main motivation for making a comment here is this:
HOW ANNOYING IS THAT CNN PRESENTER?
The way she talks bugs me more than just about anyone I have ever heard before in my life.
Maybe an edit of a clip her speaking with alternative voiceovers should be heard. I will personally buy an emusic track for whoever does that and posts it here.
this guy is a pr genius. it might do him good to volunteer to feed the homeless or perhaps bath them.
sincerely,
angela hayden
art goddess
i didn’t intend to sound callous about homeless people. I was homeless 11 years ago.
i just think all rich people should be made to volunteer in the most dire situations. It would be great for Bush to be forced to live as a homeless person for a month.
So Dan has basically created the paid video post, black-hat video optimization. Where’s Calacanis when you need him?
“Dan is a marketing guru” she closes the piece with. Love it.
Sorry Mike but when you say “he said some people do those things, not him.” – you know as well as I do that’s complete bullsh**. He says over and over “we” and “I” – how could that be misinterpreted? It can’t.
It’s ok, CNN interviews unethical people all the time, right?
Allen, why does this have to become personal?
Calling Dan unethical is unethical. You may disagree with the services he provides, but as a person who I regard as extremely intelligent, I would have expected you to argue your case, rather than simply firing a jab below the belt.
Or did you mean that he is unethical because he has flip-flopped?
I am seriously interested to understand when marketing crosses the ethical line. How do you differentiate between what Dan does and the actions of companies such as BzzAgent.com and the like who work with Fortune 500 companies to artificially inflate brand perception online and offline?
I think most people are naive about whats going on in the world of advertising and marketing in general. Marketing has always been, at least to some degree, the art of convincing people that a particular product or service will satisy their needs, even if it clearly does not.
Others have argued, that Dan is robbing us of the chance to see the true “most popular” content. That may be true, but is that so different that when Nike convinces us that their product is superior to brand x, and therefore robs us of the desire to buy brand x, even though in reality brand-x is superior?
As long as Dan is not blocking us from seeing the real “most popular” videos, I dont yet see anything that unethical, unless of course all of marketing is unethical, which very well may be the case.
Allen, I apologize for rambling and look forward to you making sense of all this.
Adrian, thanks for your kind words, I appreciate them. Let me try to clarify. Sure there is gaming on every network, every system, etc. I get it.
Dan went from “we do this” to “we don’t do this, we just are sharing what ’some’ might use”. Seemed to change once the bashing started. The CNN interview was really a 3 minute infomercial more than anything.
Second, there are parts of Dan’s thoughts and ideas that are great optimization techniques. And then there are some parts that aren’t and are below the belt.
Just as I asked in Part II of this trifecta of virality, I asked Dan to detail which pieces his company uses and which they don’t. He still hasn’t done that.
Ugh. THAT is polished? Dan sounds like a pubescent wannabe, not a marketing guru. The clients that Dan listed probably completely ripped him off, knowing what a noob he is to the marketing world. Its sad really. There are SO many Viral Marketing companies out there now, and they all amount to spammers with 0 creative content of their own.
I can’t believe all the hype TechCrunch has given this guy.
No wait. I forgot, this is the new TC.
I can believe it.
When a similar approach is taken with email instead of video it’s called spam. Why don’t we see “top ten spammer tricks” glorified here too?
Hmmm….advertising and promoting has been part of business forever. Why on earth would videos be any different?
Kudos to Greenberg…smart kid, saw an opportunity and took it.
Michael @ 16:
False analogy. Spam is unwanted email sent to a user by folks whom the user doens’t know.
Top ratings on a video site is not something forced on you unwittingly. You have to go and look for it.
Finally, viral videos sent by email are forwarded by friends — not by unwanted spammers.
Allen, thanks for response. I now see your real issue with this guy is the flip-flopping.
But what about defining precisely why this type of “marketing” crosses the ethical line? That surely is the value in all this discussion and what the industry ultimately needs to pinpoint.
Cheers!
I think I am going to hire this guy!
Adrian – I will work on a post over the coming days to answer your questions.
Hey 4. Heddy, can I paypal you the $10?
Dan “Greenburg” – hey, what do you expect from the ‘editorial process’ at techcrunch?!
Same to #12 Mike
At some point will be get to the underlying issue here? Does any of this ‘traffic’ translate into $$$?
Getting 100,000 views isn’t great marketing. I re-posted a GEICO Caveman-Phil Simms playing golf video. It’s close to 300,000 views. I didn’t use any of the tactics Dan discussed. It’s the story told by the video that makes it great and sustainable. A good, sustainable story makes great marketing.
Seth Godin is a marketing guru, Dan isn’t. A huge difference btwn their philosophies on marketing.
BTW, talking about Seth Godin, he pointed out recently about great marketing from videos, Terry Tate’s Reebok commercials. These commericals are a couple of years old and still doing well:
http://www.yout...h?v=4q4jb-kXebQ
Again different tactic from Dan, it’s the story in the video.
#24 – one thought – you look at terry tate from what 2-3 yrs ago, and I can’t imagine a marketing meeting I was in that video wasn’t brought up. The trunk monkeys is another one from several years ago.
Do bad, worthless quality videos need the black hat optimization and good viral does not? I don’t have the answer for that yet, just a thought after watching Terry again.
now dan got all his fake posts here and try to get a buzz.
“hey, lets do it again, the first time, i am evil. then I am human, the last time, i am a marketer”
20 yrs ago, unethical ppl would do unthical things and hide it. now, ppl do them and think it is norm.
5 yrs later, whoever who doesn’t admitting or doing unethical things will be dishonest.
No offence to DAG, but I’d suggest that “ethics” in the context of UGC exists on a spectrum.
At one end, is the implicit expectation that we all have of YouTube and similar sites – that popularity is purely organic, driven by legitimate viewers and word of mouth snowball effect.
In the middle is what we’d like to imagine is the reality: that most videos are legitimate, but that some gaming among circles of friends and colleagues takes place.
Then, at the extreme other end is DAG: the pretense of social is dropped completely when multiple accounts, fake comments, etc. are packaged as a paid service; its a dismissal of the expectations of UGC consumers, and that dismissal is actively concealed from audiences.
When compensated for this service, I don’t see how it can be perceived as anything other than unethical.
“Seth Godin is a marketing guru, Dan isn’t. ”
Please, Michael, frame that and post it on the front page.
I think Dan not only looks polished in this CNN interview but pretty cute too!
These fake comments really do wreck the conversation. Dan’s mom and friends, please go home.
Good grief! For a “marketing guru” that dude is incredibly boring…! Get excited about what you do, for goodness sake. If you can’t sell yourself, you aren’t going to engage anyone!
His style is definitely suited to outrageous blog posts rather than video. Which is kinda ironic
This simply shows the maturation of the web 2.0 / social networking space. We saw the exact same thing happen to usenet, email and the web 1.0 utopia. Remember how the new medium would lead to peace on earth and wealth for all? Instead we have perpetual war, stolen elections and a bankrupt nation.
Why act surprised about it happening with the newest forms of computer-mediated social interaction?
I am getting annoyed by the fake comment posts for Dan here. Has anyone looked at TC forums? There are a bunch of spam threads running there. “Catch online infidelity” and overrun by spam posts? It’s ridiculous.
This video looks fake.
It was clear from his first post that he does the things he wrote about, or at least encourages others in his organization to do them. Heck, he was gloating about some of the innovations they’d introduced into the whole process! The thing that bugs me more than anything is the fake comments, because when you post a fake comment, you are deceiving. There’s a reason Fake Steve Jobs was worried about getting fired from Forbes when he came clean…he’d been working under false pretenses.
Essentially, this guy’s admitting to perpetrating deceit on the web, and doing it with a smile. I’m sure there are companies that love that kind of attitude and will line up to work with someone who’ll lie for cash. Certainly we’re seeing posts on here from people who love what he’s doing (probably the same people running auto-adders on MySpace) but I would never do business with someone who admits his business model relies on dishonesty.
What this guy does is nothing new. Everyone’s invited a buddy to digg a post or fave a photo. What’s new here is the addition of an organization that has zero moral qualms about doing this and taking it to the Nth degree.
Bad or good, the interesting story here is that he got three articles on TechCrunch and an interview on CNN. Anything else?
I actually grew up with Dan and I think it’s pretty rude of you to make judgments about someone’s character without knowing them. There’s nothing immoral about finding a need people have and making money by fixing it. If you’re so concerned about the “purity” of youtube, don’t go on it anymore.