YouTube Explains the Mystery of Home Page Picks

Social Networks/Web Culture/YouTube/Mark Glaser
Found on: pbs.org

Mark Glaser's blog post tries to demystify the process YouTube uses to select which videos make it onto their home page.

He also questions the legitimacy of certain videos on YouTube's "Most Viewed" pages (not to mention censoring negative comments on it's videos.) and the techniques some marketers are using to promote their videos like hacking the system with programs to boost their view count.

MediaShift Post:

Mark Day, a friend of mine in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been trying to break into stand-up comedy for the past year. Recently, he got a big break by having one of his brief video comic bits — The Smiley Intervention — featured on the front page of YouTube . Not long after getting in the featured spot, his video shot up to 750,000 views, and he got hundreds of new subscribers to his YouTube channel, the home of his videos.

Day is a savvy marketing guy, so I wondered what he had done to win that slot. Did he contact YouTube to tout his videos? Did he pay for the featured slot? No and no. He attributed his success to finding topics that are timely — like George Bush’s backrub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel — and keeping his videos short and (bitter)sweet.

I reached out to a few folks who had videos featured on YouTube’s home page, and they all said they hadn’t contacted YouTube or paid for the slots. However, in one case, video director Brett Mazurek told me he had met with YouTube staff and shown them a trailer for his documentary on Ugandan hip-hop, which was featured on YouTube’s home page earlier this week.