I complained a while ago about the lack of reporting for advertising impressions on Vuze, but they have come through big time. It seems they switched their advertising network right around the time I uploaded Two Night Stand on June 30, but the reporting system was still looking for data from the old network. I’m kind of surprised it took so long to figure that out, but I guess the producers of VIP Topless Hotties Clip 3 are getting most of their revenue elsewhere and aren’t paying as close attention as I am. After a month or so of pushing, I got a report last night letting me know that in 6 weeks I’ve earned over $1000 from my various videos on Vuze, the vast majority of it coming from Two Night Stand. This is by far the most I’ve earned from my own films, and I’m very happy about it. I haven’t made back my out of pocket expenses on Two Night Stand, but it makes a significant dent. Approximately half of the Two Night Stand downloads recorded by Vuze generated qualified advertising impressions.
Sadly, the glory days of Two Night Stand on Vuze are over. It will probably overtake “Dcmdp: The Package,” a badly recorded, slightly dirty joke, to make it the #4 most downloaded video ever on Vuze, but it doesn’t seem likely to make it any higher.
Way back in 1998 when I started college, I had two options for email. I could either use PINE via telnet on the university’s servers, or I could use a mail program like Outlook or Eudora. I chose Outlook for home use, and PINE when I was away from my computer. And I never deleted anything. Luckily I had an astronomically large hard drive that I think was 80 GB, but that seems really big for 1998. So after 6 years at my college email address (No, not 6 years of college. I worked there for 2 years after I graduated) I had accumulated about 512MB of email in the proprietary PST format. Then I switched to Gmail, which everyone knows is much, much better than anything else ever.
When Gmail went down for about an hour yesterday, I started thinking about how much I value my Gmail account and how nice it would be to have access to all my old emails. And even though it wasn’t proving especially reliable yesterday, I think Gmail is just about the safest place to keep them. It’s way more accessible than a PST file, which we’ll see in a moment.
I was on my Mac at the time, so I tried to open the PST file on a Mac program. I figured Mail could do it. Wrong. Then I thought Entourage was a natural choice since it’s made by the same company. But astonishingly enough, Entourage has no ability to open Windows PST files. Microsoft has a utility that can convert PST files from Outlook 2001 for Mac only. Then of course I thought of Thunderbird. It’s a great program and I used it for my work emails while I was in Germany. No dice there either. It was obviously time to switch to Windows.
I opened the PST file in Outlook 2003 for Windows. Then I tried to connect to Gmail via IMAP. No luck. It wouldn’t connect to the server. So I opened Thunderbird for Windows and had it import all my Outlook mail. First I had to make Outlook my default mail program. Then I connected to imap.google.com and created a new folder to put all my old messages in. I dragged a huge folder I had informatively called “unsorted archives” into the Gmail folder and Thunderbird immediately started uploading all the messages to Gmail. This took a large part of the night. When I woke up they were done, and since then I’ve been uploading the other, smaller folders. It works most of the time, but sometimes I’ll get an error from the server saying that a particular message can’t be “appended.” Then I go in and figure out where the upload stopped and copy everything into the folder again.
I don’t know how useful my emails from 2nd semester freshman year will be, but you never know when you might need to know something. All of my email only takes up 30% of my quota on Gmail, so it doesn’t hurt to have it available. I don’t have my old high school emails, but I suspect some things are better lost to the ages.
Last week Two Night Stand was posted on Dailymotion without my permission and I had it taken down. Now this afternoon one of the founders of Ragtube.com posted three of my videos on Ragtube.com without my permission, then sent me a YouTube message to ask if it was OK. Of course it was not OK, but I checked out the site just to see if I wanted to post it there myself. It turned out they were showing overlay ads during the movies. Ads that would generate revenue for this guy, but not for me. Why would anyone think that was acceptable? I requested that the videos be taken down, although as of now they are still up.
It might seem like because I’ve posted a video for free in one place that I wouldn’t mind posting it in another place, but that is really not the case. Here, in no particular order are my reasons why it’s not OK to repost videos from one hosting site to another.
It is illegal. This is a no-brainer, but it bears repeating. Posting a video for free on one site does not automatically grant other people the legal rights to redistribute your film. Not only are they violating the copyright of the author of the video, but they are also almost certainly violating the terms of use of the site they’re taking the video from. I might not have lawyers, but YouTube sure does.
Credit is taken away. Sure, there are probably credits in the video itself, but if it’s posted by someone else then it dilutes the authorship. It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to my films, I don’t want anyone else taking credit without doing any work.
Loss of control. When someone else uploads your video, you can’t do Quality Control on the video and audio, moderate comments, modify metadata, or choose a thumbnail. These are important aspects of the presentation of the film, and make a real difference.
No income. If there is any revenue generated by the video, it should go to the author, not to some random person who happened to like the movie.
There are better options. I understand that usually the motivation behind the reposter is simply to share the video with others. But guess what, that’s what web video is all about. There are better ways to share the video that don’t break any of these rules. The obvious one is to embed the video rather than repost it. You can also write about it and link to the video. There is no shortage of video sharing options.
So anyway, even if your intentions are pure, please don’t repost my videos. Feel free to share them though.
I’ve been exploring the various video websites over the past few weeks, uploading a few videos at each one. I figured it was worth my time to upload at least to the ones who offer the potential to make some money like blip.tv, imeem, Metacafe, and Atom. Yesterday I got around to Atom Films. I uploaded Two Night Stand, but for some mysterious reason I got a message informing me that my content had been “banned” for violating the user agreement. After that I tried uploading Getting Laid Tonight, which promptly disappeared with no explanation. I’m not going to waste any time trying to figure out what the story is. It seems buggy. Atom Films has been around practically since the dawn of the Internet, but they relaunched in June as a Comedy Central-branded video site. So I suspect they’re working out some kinks. I’ll check in on them in a few months.
10 minutes ago I got a Google Alert letting me know that Two Night Stand had been posted on Dailymotion. I went to the page, and the movie was there, posted by someone else. Now, I give that movie away to anyone who wants it, and Dailymotion seems like a fine place to have the video posted, but I don’t want it posted under someone else’s username. That’s re-distribution, and I don’t cotton to it. It’s nice that this person is interested enough to share the movie, but you can do that by embedding the video from any of the dozen or so sites where the film is legally available.
So I sent my First Takedown Notice Ever. Dailymotion has a very easy to find form and I told them I wanted my movie removed. I got an email back within a minute or two letting me know it was gone from the site. I checked, and it is indeed removed. I was really impressed. Thanks Dailymotion!
I had some troubles with Vuze (the peer-to-peer-video part, not the excellent part formerly known as Azureus) in the past, but last week I used it to submit my entry for the OpenCut competition and I saw some real improvement. For some reason my video was not compatible with Vuze’s re-encoding software, so you can’t just hit play and have it start as it downloads. I think that’s because it’s 1080p, and as far as I can tell most of their HD stuff is 720p. But I’m not really sure. Either way, Vuze seems perfectly happy to keep my 280 MB QT file on their servers and send it to anyone who wants it. I uploaded Two Night Stand, and it was re-encoded by Vuze, and it seems like great quality.
Vimeo still has them beat as far as I’m concerned. You don’t need special software to download or watch anything from Vimeo. Of course it remains to be seen if Vimeo can keep paying for all that bandwidth. Vuze gets to exploit its users’ bandwidth, which obviously saves a lot of money. But if the cable and telephone companies change their business models and start charging residential customers for their bandwidth usage you can be sure Vuze won’t be quite so attractive.
The mystery is over. YouTube, in another in a long series of overdue moves, has revealed some real information about how people find your YouTube videos. In my case, it turns out that my most popular videos happen to be declared “related” to some other, more popular videos. I’ve never questioned the success of the “Bad Webcam Sex” video, which is naturally connected to all kinds of filth that people are mistakenly looking for on YouTube instead of the entire rest of the Internet. What really surprised me was the sudden and unexpected rise of viewers for Two Night Stand. I’ve now learned that nearly 50% of the traffic comes from being “related” to a video called “Fake Wife Swap” which was made for one of those 24-hour film festival challenges. 90% of Two Night Stand viewers come from related videos.
The other big change—which still hasn’t quite worked itself out yet—is the so-called “high quality” option for YouTube videos. On certain videos (the criteria isn’t at all clear to me) you can add &fmt=6 to the URL and get a significantly better video. Unfortunately I don’t know what you have to upload in order to get the higher quality. Is it a higher resolution, or a higher bitrate that I should be going for? Adding &fmt=6 to most videos gets you the usual blender-set-on-purée look. Some guidance from YouTube would be nice.
UPDATE: Brian Gary has an article at kenstone.net explaining the best settings to use to take advantage of YouTube’s higher quality options.
I use Azureus quite a bit when I want to download something quickly thanks to the bandwidth of thousands of my friends. In an effort to become legitimate, Azureus has launched a streaming service called Vuze that encourages distribution of HD content. I don’t have any HD content to share right now, but on the web, 640×480 is pretty high-res. So I decided to upload a few things and try it out. I started with Getting Laid Tonight. Everything happens very quickly. Upload is as fast as you can make it, and the download is too. But the audio was a few seconds out of sync. I’ve had trouble with Getting Laid Tonight in the past because the fully cropped video is a non-standard size. That might have been the problem. So I tried the Brad Wood music video. The sync was fine, but the compression destroyed the music quality. Everything sounds over-modulated. I’ve removed both videos from the “content network” but I’ll try out a few other things. I’m mainly interested in this for the distribution of my animated series. I’m going to create it in HD, so this could be a good way to distribute the HD video.
Marshall Herskovitz, co-creater of the Internet series Quarterlife, has an article in Slate today about what he’s learned about the Internet by doing an online series. The main thing he seems to have absorbed is that a partially naked girl in the thumbnail is the only thing you need to get a lot of hits. It just highlights how ridiculous it is that YouTube gives only 3 options for a thumbnail. The thumbnail is the poster for your movie. It is essentially the entire advertising campaign. How hard would it be to give us the option of choosing any frame from the video as the thumbnail? It’s not 1995, we have this technology.
Last June I noticed a trend caused by the arbitrarily assigned thumbnails on my Truth @ 15fps YouTube videos. Videos with Jennie thumbnails got almost 7 times more views than videos with Kyle thumbnails.
Now that we’re allowed to choose from 3 options for thumbnails, I’ve switched all the Truth @ 15fps videos to Jennie thumbnails (with the exception of the first one which Jennie’s not in) which has raised the average of those videos to 5,765. Although the other ones still lead with an average of 29,700, the difference is closer to 5 times as much now. Since last June, the Bad Webcam Sex video views have doubled to over 2 million.
What’s interesting me today though, is my film Two Night Stand, which at 18 minutes is a tough sell for YouTube. They don’t even let people upload videos longer than 10 minutes anymore. I managed to get a director account before they imposed that limitation though, so I got grandfathered in. Here are my thumbnail options:
When I uploaded it in July 2006, the only option was the middle one. I switched it to the left-hand one a few months ago, and hits have gone up considerably since then. People commenting who have actually watched it all the way through are way up too, which is the most important thing to me. As of today, the video is at 97,506 views, which is way more than even Getting Laid Tonight, which is both short and has a suggestive title. The main difference I see between the two thumbnails is that rather than just a shirtless Chris in the original one, you get an indication that there may be a naked lady under those sheets in the left-hand option. It’s a lesson for the kids out there.
10 minutes ago I got a Google Alert letting me know that Two Night Stand had been 