A few years ago, I hosted a webinar for students at Full Sail University. I discussed my third book, The New Small. After I covered my material, I opened up the floor for questions like this one:
Student: How do you get a video to go viral?
Me: There's no way to guarantee that. You're really throwing darts.
Four years later, I stand by my response. With so much content on YouTube every hour, there's simply no way to devise a video guaranteed to generate millions of views. Interestingly, though, there are some things you can do to increase the chances from zero to slightly-better-than-zero. As Felix Gillette on BusinessWeek writes:
Kreiz of Maker Studios says his team has developed 40 “levers” it can pull on the YouTube platform to optimize an artist’s reach and value. For example, he says, Maker has a proprietary tool that looks at variables such as geography, target audience, and number of subscribers to a channel to determine the optimal time to upload a new video. “It can be vastly different if you’re in gaming vs. in fashion,” says Kreiz. “One could be Sunday morning, the other could be Wednesday afternoon. We can automate that and adapt it in real time based on all these various attributes.”
Put differently, multi-channel networks (MCNs) are shaping content via extensive data and metadata. They are reaching their audiences more effectively, making boatloads of cash in the process. Dates matter. Time matters. Tags matter.
Artists are increasingly relying upon data to get their videos, books, music, and movies seen. I find this fascinating. No, data does not replace creativity, judgment, and intuition. Still, creative types who ignore potentially valuable information do so at their own peril. After all, don't these artists want to be seen? To get that next book or movie deal? Data here serves as a means to an end.
Simon Says: What's your excuse?
Is anyone laughing now at Google's 2007 $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube? Those skeptics seems to have disappeared.
If musicians and authors are looking at data more than ever, what's the excuse for a knowledge worker to do otherwise?
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