YouTube Sucks

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Yeah, that’s right, YouTube sucks. I recently had two YouTube accounts deleted for reasons unknown. Unfortunately, both accounts had tons of videos on them and both were nearly two years old. This was a lot of work down the tubes, and a lot of traffic and “link juice” lost.

I was getting a crap-load of traffic from those two YouTube channels. Now I have to rebuild.

Now, I do actually love using YouTube. It’s probably where I spend most of my internet surfing time. However, I certainly don’t like the fact that they do not inform one of the reason for account deletion. They apparently “… are unable to provide specific feedback…”.

And along with myself a number of other effective internet marketers also got slapped within just a couple days. My partner Jon Mroz went down. Andrew Murray went down, and several others, all marketers in our industry.

But there were a few lessons learned here.

Firstly, if you are posting videos that have any possibility of being perceived as overly-promotional, I would recommend creating multiple YouTube accounts and limiting the number of vids that you post on each account. This way, should you get what is so lovingly referred to as “The YouTube Slap”, you don’t end up losing hundreds of videos and back-links.

Secondly, if you have another blog or other websites (like I did) on which you have embedded your YouTube videos and those sites are important to your business promotion…. this is a bad idea. I can’t even begin to tell you what a pain it has been to try and go through all my pages, find the missing vids, then try to locate the original video on my computer so that I can upload it to another server, and then re-embed it. Hours and hours and hours of wasted time.

Now, if you are using YouTube for back-linking, that is one thing. Limit the number of vids you post to each channel to about 10, and make sure that you keep a log of what videos are on each channel AND note for yourself the location of each of those videos on your PC so that if you do get slapped, you at least have a quick way to locate all the vids you need to replace. Plus you only lose 10 to 20 backlinks instead of hundreds. And DON’T use your YouTube vids on your promotional websites. Nothing worse than having ads running and directing people to pages with missing videos on them.

Using a private video host for your promotional vids or for all the vids on your blog is the best approach. I use EZS3.com and Amazon S3 for most of my stuff. Private video hosting charges you for volume of information transferred. It is very cheap if you consider how many views of a vid can be seen in exchange for a certain amount of money. Currently I spend a couple hundred dollars per month just for video transfer costs. So it gets tempting to use free services such as YouTube for pages that you know are getting tons and tons of views and the video is going to be played thousands of times.

I’ve also tried using Viddler, which is another free video host, but they seem to have certain thresholds for viewing per unit of time. For example I tried putting a Viddler vid on one of my capture pages and it got several thousand views in just a few days and then Viddler just deleted the account with no notice. Hell, at least YouTube notifies you. In the case of Viddler I think it’s just a question of them seeing a brand-new video post go from zero views to 3000 views in two days… so it get’s auto-flagged, then reviewed by Viddler staff, and if there is anything promotional in it, it’s gone.

Clearly, at least for me, it is much less costly to just pay for the transfer charges for Amazon S3, as the time I will have to spend to get all these videos replaced (not to mention the ones that I can’t seem to find, and the ones that I don’t even know which video it was that I embedded) is much more costly.

And obviously, with private video hosting you get far more options as far as players, sizes, options, redirects, etc.