Re: [Harp-L] Youtube question

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bruce Ritter wrote:
> I've recently posted some new videos to YouTube, (I'm not quite ready to
> share the links yet, I want to clean up the titles) and I've gotten an email
> extolling their virtues and telling me about how I can get more subs.  It
> looks like spam to me, but can anyone tell me why I would want more folks to
> subscribe to my YouTube channel?

I have a bunch of YT videos up for various projects I worked on a few years 
ago for people in an industry whose videos have absolutely no entertainment 
value whatsoever, they were simply videos made to inform a small group of 
business people about some dull product news.  These videos are utterly 
boring and at this point completely obsolete.

And nearly once a week I get a message that someone has subscribed to one 
or more of these videos.

Your instinct is dead-on, companies that make such offers are usually 
ambitious teenagers and people in Asian countries trying to help you lose 
weight in your wallet.

This is identical to so-called 'comment spam' that boneheads place on 
blogs.  It's mainly an attempt to place the URL to their website on as many 
other websites as possible because in the olden days a big spread of such 
random links actually helped your Google ranking.  Generally such website 
owners have paid good money to a scammer who tells them that their 
website'll make 'em a millionaire once they're up on the Google 
rankings.  Other people pay big money just to learn how to sell junk 
'niche' products, and then pay a big premium to get someone to spam YouTube 
and legitimate blogs.

At this point Google is very smart about telling real links from comment 
spam.

You can't prevent people from subbing to your videos, as far as I 
know.  But it doesn't hurt you at all.  And there are lots of ways to 
prevent comment spam on your blogs.

Now, a number of my friends have posted videos on YouTube that have gotten 
a few thousand hits.  They get approached by Google, which owns YouTube, to 
create their own channel with a Google AdWords box on the page.  Some of 
these friends have made enough to buy a glass of beer off their AdWords 
box, even when they are not selling anything of their own.  (You can do a 
YouTube channel even if you have no views, or at least you used to be able 
to.  You can also get an AdWords block pretty easily.  You don't have to be 
invited.)

Now, a company that wants to sell you a bunch of YouTube subs is, as you 
have guessed, pretty much a scam.  They have a list of fake-subscribers 
that they developed, and in exchange for the contents of your wallet you'll 
actually see those subscribers on your page.  If Google hasn't already 
identified those names as fakes (they are the geniuses of data mining and 
they can actually figure these things out pretty easily) then you might 
even get the offer to start your own channel, etc, etc, but you will not 
have spent your money wisely.  I doubt that you were even considering this 
at all.

By the way, when a YT video really seriously takes off, with hundreds of 
thousands or millions of views, you can actually cut a deal with Google to 
get paid per view.  A couple of years ago a well-known young female 
singer-songwriter got 120 million views for one of her hit 
videos/songs.  She said in an interview that she made over a million bucks 
from YouTube.

I say we have a Harp-l contest for whoever makes the first million off a YT 
harmonica video.

Whoever wins gets a free kitten!