How to Tell the Internet About Your New YouTube Video

[This article by Ryan Henson Creighton is re-posted from the Untold Entertainment blog, which is awesome.]

One element of my effort to drive awareness of our Spellirium Pre-Order crowdfunding campaign is a series of video developer diaries called Spellirium Minute. i had always wanted to produce video diary content, but i worried about all the effort involved in shooting and editing the videos together. In this article, i hope to convey that creating the video is the easy part.

i Post This Video Every Day

Robby "the Doogs" Duguay has been a big supporter of the campaign so far. Last week, he sat down with me and we banged out eighteen Spellirium Minute developer diary videos. All of them are short, screencapped vids about two minutes apiece, in which i talk about different design processes during the five long years we've been building the game. The videos contain info about our prototype regimen, communication with artists, and the inspiration that led to the project. They make for interesting viewing, and of course i'd like to get them out to as many people as possible.

Hey, hippies! Wanna watch a video?

i have enough content to release one video every day for the duration of the campaign. What i didn't realize was the enormous chunk of every morning that would be taken up promoting each video. This is the process i follow from the moment i hit that "Upload" button on YouTube:

Prepping the Video on YouTube

Shouting From the Rooftops

From there, i have to pull a million different levers to get the link out to a bunch of different nooks and crannies:

TIGSource

There's a Spellirium thread on the TIGSource forums that i update regularly. But TIGSource is a rare and precious snowflake that operates differently from many other sites. For example, the forum doesn't let you embed YouTube videos (PLEASE let me know if i'm wrong about that), and it uses a phpBB/wiki-style markup. (note: posting to Gamasutra presents a similar hassle.) Here's the painful process of posting there:

Finally, since Twitter is easily our largest referrer, i make sure to schedule or post repeated announcements throughout the day, since Twitter is only effective if people happen to see your link float by in their feed when they're looking at Twitter.

Comb hair. Brush teeth. Promote video.

(who am i kidding? i don't have time to comb my hair)

This is the routine i run through every morning, which actually begins the night before at midnight EST when i post the video to YouTube and Twitter only (partly for my Australian friends, and partly for fear that i'll sleep in the next morning and completely miss my promotional window for the Eastern Standard Time breakfast crowd). Another key repost time is 11:30/12:00 PM EST, which is the double-whammy of lunchtime break for EST people and breakfast for PST people.

We've also created some "special" videos which took longer to shoot and required more effort, but they're there to sort of break away from the sameness of the screencapped vids, and to hopefully enjoy some viral sharing. The last "special" video we posted showed me pointlessly demoing the 2D Spellirium game on the 3D Oculus Rift.

Today's special is a Spellirium-styled parody of the Pokémon Rap:


watch Spellirium Minute Episode #7: The Dictionary Rap


The punchline is that through all of this, my video strategy is not working. Just take a quick look at the abysmal double-digit views each video is pulling.

Over the past week, with one video going up every single day, and despite a big push from Kotaku that brought over 5000 people to the first vid, YouTube accounts for a whole 27 visits to the Spellirium campaign. However, that's more eyeballs than articles on certain big press sites have brought us. Our conversion rate is high at 64%, and our lowest-priced and most popular tier is $15. If my i-flunked-high-school-math calculations are correct, the entire week-long YouTube effort has been worth roughly $275 to us so far. But maybe it's a slow burn?

i'm Taking Requests

You'll notice that despite all of this hustling, i'm still really only hitting a lot of insular locations. Where's Google+? Where's Dailymotion/Metacafe/Vimeo? There are so many more places on the Internatz. My blast radius is still quite close to home, and i haven't yet discovered many great places to share these videos that draw a potential audience from far and wide. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Maybe then, i'll have to spend the entire day promoting these videos, instead of "just" the entire morning.