09.05.12
YouTube Ads: Pig in a Poke
“Google, and YouTube, and their competitors have made the place — a web where winner-takes-all. And there isn’t anyone else. It’s the top or nothing. Root hog or die.”
Once you establish a regular pattern of uploading videos to YouTube, the Google property attracts you with blandishments to “monetize” and “make an ad campaign for your video.” This is all said to be good for growing your audience.
I’ve dealt with monetization on Google properties previously. For the majority it’s a waste of time. You might get enough clicks to justify Google sending a check in five to ten years of activity, if you haven’t changed your address by then.
Barring old traditional media exposure, like on TV — or in a big magazine or newspaper — Google AdSense/AdWords campaigns are for Internet bottom feeders with more significant amounts of money to spend but not quite enough to get advertising into big old traditional media.
YouTube recommended I advertise “Rich Man’s Burden.”
So I set up an ad campaign of “impressions,” for it to be served as a “featured” piece advertised as a satirical funny song about the wealthy in related works, for seven days.
After two days Google/YouTube had served the impression approximately 2500 times. Over the course of the seven day campaign it was on a schedule for about 8750 impressions.
The click through to actual view of “Rich Man’s Burden” was about 2.5 percent, of which only 16 percent of hits (or about 0.3 percent of the total ad impressions served) watched it three quarters of the way through. About fifty percent of the viewers, out of a total of a little over sixty Google/YouTube alleged clicks on it, did not watch at all. That is they did not even register in the breakdown Google presents to you on the percentages which watched 25, 50, 75 or 100 percent of
the video.
This is a stat I took to mean that many people who click on impressions immediately leave before any content can be streamed, before a second or even a fraction of one elapses. (Remember, these are not even the in-line streamed ads YouTube compels you to watch before other content.)
Which tells me that the observation that, for many, clicking on Internet ads is done as a meaningless and random behavior is probably fairly accurate.
For “Rich Man’s Burden,” here, the Google/YouTube ad campaign cost 11 cents a view and was not cost effective in any way.
For very modestly boosting video views to an audience that might never be exposed to it, a presumably legitimate purpose, it was relatively expensive per hit even though such campaigns and ads are very cheap to implement. And it was a complete statistical wash for getting people to click through to the YouTube channel.
I tried to find an ad impression for “Rich Man’s Burden” while it was running using a variety of keyword searches similar to what the video ad contained and could not.
YouTube does not furnish obvious tools for this so honing an ad campaign is a matter of trial, error and effort requiring what probably amounts to a substantial waste of money and time for the average person with an account.
At two days I canceled the campaign scheduled for seven. After an initial 24 hours “views” dropped off noticeably telling me that YouTube had hit the audience it was serving — whatever it was, one could define that it be in the United States or other locales, or restricted to certain ages. Subsequently, it was just repeating with the same pool. And that at all times it was impossible to know what the demographic was, only that the ad wasn’t particularly effective. I get better numbers just putting it in a blog post here every other day of the week.
YouTube took four days to examine the ad, approve it and get things running.
As a come-on, Google/YouTube furnishes a calculator which purports to estimate how many views you will get for a certain ad buy. Mine was 750, unambitious, and certainly a very small potential target number in the YouTube/Google scheme of things. And it would have comprised a 10 to 11 percent return on the buy. It was a total fabrication.
One understands how and why Google properties can give away $75 or $100 certificates for promoting ad campaigns. These “free” sums would not be expected to return any interesting results. They are bait.
You’ll use that “free” money, get nothing or next to nothing for it, and think you did it wrong. Or that it just needs to run a second time — with a few tweaks. Or that two or three times the spend will do it. And that’s when they have you.
On Facebook ad impressions look almost the same as those on YouTube and other Google properties. I would expect them to be similar wastes of time and money for the great mean of people who buy them.
Alway remember the solid web phenomenon of people who click on ad impressions but don’t actually look at them for even a fraction of a second. While you are charged for them, it is just money blowing away in the air.
It would come as no surprise that some, or an increasing number in corporate America, view such advertising as virtually worthless. That being the case, and since they are always under peer pressure to be seen as being active and liked on the web, there is substantial incentive to cheat the system. (Which I’ll get to.)
“Doody.” Appropriate.
Related: Gaming/buying views on YouTube — at the LA Times.
The above, on how to buy significant views for a worthless and purposely unwatchable video, combined with this post, leads one to a conclusion about web ranking and value as based on number of views.
If you don’t read it, the subject is that two reporters bought 60,000 views on YouTube for a video of paint drying, paying about 100 dollars to black hat services that deliver numbers. YouTube’s algorithms, allegedly tuned to freeze out cheating, did not detect it.
That comes to a tenth of a penny per view for 60,000 as opposed to what I paid through a legitimate YouTube campaign before canceling it as futile, 11 cents per view, according to Google, for an insignificant number (22 cents per, if you get technical, factoring in that about 50 percent of the clicks, by the search giant’s own measurements, didn’t watch at all) — 60 or so — and virtually zero clicks on my channel.
View counts are all important on YouTube, as with “likes” and “shares” on Facebook, and — in a less direct manner through linking, in Google search. High numbers dictate opportunity with YouTube algorithms favorably positioning your video in recommended lists to others and in search returns. Low numbers mean you are regarded as disease. The few people who do see your video on search will never click on it because American web users believe only high view counts, likes, shares, Twitter followers and reviews on Amazon are indicators of quality.
The conclusion one arrives at is that you are a chump if you choose to play within the system rather than cheat and just buy clicks, back links, likes or numbers from black hat sites experienced at rigging. If you worry about people seeing where your views are coming from — all from Mongolia because that’s where a taken over network is operating — you just hide your statistics on geo-location from the public leaving only the raw view number. As many do.
Consider, Google advises webmasters and random users not to do such things, not to just sell links without ‘no follow’ attributes to other websites, because their programmers and algorithms may discover you trying to manipulate their search and swat ranking.
But you already have the equivalent of zero ranking. You cannot be punished by having your content downgraded any further than it already is. It is out of sight of the top and, therefore, out of mind.
Google, and YouTube, and their competitors have made the place — a web where winner-takes-all. And there isn’t anyone else. It’s the top or nothing. Root hog or die.
There are always those, every week, who get lucky. They may be discovered by a high traffic site that decides to send them viewers or clicks. And an audience is established, value built, in such a manner.
However, for the great majority, this is not something that can be planned for or worked toward because it is reliant on whimsy, fortune, things which cannot be programmed.
If you are not in the first page of results, or the couple of handfuls of those with the highest likes, or whatever social metric of the day is being discussed as very special, you will not exist. Search is of no economic value to you. It is of value only to the very topmost.
For example, big official corporate cheating is fairly obvious on Google. If you use Google to search for news items, Arriana Huffington’s Huffington Post is always in the top few returns. For everything.
And when you go to some Huffington Post link you find, almost without relief, that it is not the generator of the original information but the equivalent of some vapid placeholder posted by a nobody, which contains a link to and some copy from the original source, the latter always ranked below it. Even though it may be more respected. And this is well known but nothing can be done about it.
Huffington Post (like Wikipedia) is the perfect example of orderly Internet rigging.
The former has paid for that advantage through the work of programmers and web designers rather than heavy intrusive advertising or any intrinsic but hard to measure qualities obvious to human beings.
Nobody with sense could possibly believe that the Huffington Post is an oracle on all things. But it bested Google.
There are other examples. Pick them from your experience.
And so Google and its properties, and the social networks, have made a world where there is only incentive to cheat and to do so big. In fact, there is little apparent downside as the environment mostly selects against those who do not.
Now don’t you sell links to worthless places, or buy views, or employ a service with phony accounts on Facebook or Twitter to like and follow you! You’ll anger the powers that be and they’ll turn you into a toad.
Oh wait, you’re already a toad at the bottom of the virtual pit they made for you.
Nevermind, go right ahead. Do the bad stuff.
“[Buying views from black hats] comes to a tenth of a penny per view for 60,000 as opposed to what I paid through a legitimate YouTube campaign before canceling it as futile, 11 cents per view, according to Google, for an insignificant number (22 cents per, if you get technical, factoring in that about 50 percent of the clicks, by the search giant’s own measurements, didn’t watch at all) — 60 or so … “