Youtube Book Trailer Experiment update.

For a while I have had two trailers posted on youtube none of them got over 40 views in two years.
As an experiment I decided to bump up the views on them using a promotion company called Viewet.
They offered two types of promotion one free and one for a fee both giving genuine views (not bots) to bump up your view count.
The paid for views just cost $4 for 1000 views. The free one required a software download (a special video player that works in the background.) It works on a view mine and I'll view yours type of set up.
I put one video on the free service in mid November 2011 and on the other I purchased 1000 views.
The free service slowly gave me views and by Christmas day it had acquired over 400 views.
The other video gained 4000 views, remember I had only purchased 1000.
So I purchased another 1000 views for this video and left the other one on the free service.
Today my free video stands at over 700 views and the other has over 24,700 views. Remember only 2000 views had been purchased. I had gained an extra 22,700 genuine views for free.
$8 in total spent in my view was a worthy investment for the coverage.
This proves to me that my little jiggery pokery with the videos has worked and gets them seen by more youtube viewers.

Now I have added a promotion to both the videos offering my book from smashwords for free until Feb 5th 2012. This will be an interesting experiment that should show up in downloads on smashwords (fingers crossed). Here are the videos if you are interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkSvrf8ZESA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdXLX1KTQCM.

Youtube is a good tool to use and should not be ignored when promoting your work!

I will let you know how this turns out.

Very interesting! I'll be anxious to know whether the views generate book sales. I've had nearly 500 views for Ghost Orchid's youtube trailer, but I don't know how to connect them with sales.

dkchristi wrote:

Very interesting! I'll be anxious to know whether the views generate book sales. I've had nearly 500 views for Ghost Orchid's youtube trailer, but I don't know how to connect them with sales.

My thought also!

DK, Alice,
My promotion has a coupon generated by smashwords that relates only to the youtube Videos I can get info regarding downloads via the coupon and see how it is working. Only people who go to the youtube video will get the coupon number to use.

Very interesting, David! I've just added a new video for Mr. Planemaker's Diving Machine (it's only a minute long!). I'll look into this way of promoting the video. Here it is:

Shelagh,
Your view count up to 300 will be updated in real time on a view for view basis.
After 300 views youtube switches the video to a different system where views are audited by the system not on a one for one and take 48 hours or longer to update.
The count will freeze for a while at around the 300 mark because of this. Every video does.
So always check the status analysis of the video to see how it is doing as the counter underneath the viewer won't update in real time.
Mine froze at 300 then froze again at 5,089 for 10 days before it updated but the count in the statistics page changed and reflected accurately the views it had.

It is a nice video and works well with the music top marks!

Nice video. Hope it works for you.

Thanks David and Abe!