Your Next Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It Is… YouTube!
by Ric Williams (e)RICEAV • January 23, 2012 • Announcement, Feature, News
How do you drive more highly engaged traffic to your YouTube channel and get them to interact with your content? With an Empire Avenue Mission, of course!
In the next few days we will launch the ability to measure the outcome of a YouTube action by asking your Shareholders to subscribe and interact with a video or channel. All of these actions can be rewarded, and no Eaves will be paid to them until they click the buttons you want them to. Most of this will be accomplished right on the Mission’s page itself. For Missions participants – you will also benefit, as the creators can be more confident in what the return will be; meaning that they will probably put up more Eaves (hint, hint) and thus, we hope, it will create a better experience for everyone.
I was lucky enough to be in the crowd last week at CES when YouTube’s Robert Kyncl, VP of global content, gave some great stats and introduced a panel discussion talking to the new channel strategy of YouTube-sponsored content coming over the next few months. Creative folks like Felicia Day & Anthony Zuiker are just a couple of the great content creators who will have channels on YouTube soon. The drive behind Robert’s chat was that good, relevant content in a niche is where YouTube can excel in gaining a global reach. In addition and probably more relevant for YouTube, they can excel in reaching these niches for the global advertising dollar.
Some of the stats Robert talked to were pretty astonishing; my three favourites were:
By 2015, 90% of all internet traffic will be video.
YouTube streams 3 Billion hours of video a month; that is 30 minutes of video for every man, woman and child on the planet. Wow!
Michelle Phan, a cosmetics video blogger on YouTube, has more views than Style Channel per episode, not just by a short margin either. 750k for Style Channel, 1.5m on average for Phan. Boom, marketing to a niche! Phan is now one of the faces for Loreal.
I was talking with some friends after the keynote and their opinions of Michelle and others like her were interesting. While they did not disregard her amazing growth and great relevant content for a niche, the conversation theme surrounded Phan was lucky to be in the right place at the right time when YouTube was booming, and therefore there was a great symbiotic relationship occurring with content drivers in niches. As the conversation showed, if Michelle had launched her channel in 2012 she may not have gained the traffic and subscribers that she has now. It is becoming more difficult to drive people to your content and engage them just because of the sheer amount of content that is now on YouTube.
Missions have proven incredibly powerful for driving engagement with online content, and this is just one way we’re improving the feature. This release will be the first of a few that we will release over the coming weeks with a similar theme, i.e. giving the creator traceability and help them to better engage people in their content.
WOW thats great can’t wait to test it
THX!
Those numbers are amazing. I’m excited to try the new features of video missions. Thanks for updating us Ric. Kim
awesome Ric
one suggestion is on targeting you can select 200 shares and up or a price per share but they are all up, nothing for people that own less than or price is lower than
Great news!
very cool idea and the stats cited are inspiring to get me to try video blogging.
This is great news! Awesome. Cannot wait to try this new feature
Oooh! I like the look of this. Very interesting indeed! Thanks for the update.
This looks very great, I know I have to step up my video blogging and this is the incentive I needed:-)
This seems to be just in time as I am preparing to nurture my Youtube channel . Will be eagerly waiting to see new features inside the mission. Great News!
I’m looking forward to this!! WOOHOO!
Love this!! Thanks Empire.
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I must be an anomaly but I only visit YouTube because of Empire Avenue Missions. I’d much prefer to read a blog than watch a video. And a bad blog entry is much more tolerable than a bad video blog which can just be painful to watch. If I last 10 seconds on some of them, that’s 10 seconds too many.
My question is about YouTube and Missions. It would be very simple if it was “Get 1,000 eaves for subscribing to my YouTube channel.” But only a small portion of Missions are this simple & straight-forward. Players are more likely to run into “Get 500 eaves for watching my video, giving a thumbs up, favoriting, commenting and sharing.” That is, a small amount of eaves for multiple actions, sometimes the Mission is to watch several videos and comment.
How will EAv handle this? Can it track multiple actions? Or, one hopes, can Missions be limited to doing ONE action for a certain reward? Seriously, I’ve seen Missions where people ask to be followed on Twitter AND have their videos commented upon AND sign up for the blog email list AND give them +Ks. Oh, and if you could max out their stock, it would be appreciated. ; )
I’ll admit this it’s a minority of Missions that are that demanding but some people see it as a chance to post a list of tasks that need to be accomplished and I’m not sure how many have to be done to receive a reward.
Hey Liz,
Right now it’s really up to the Mission creator to understand that they can only track/reward certain actions. Same as before – if you create a Mission that goes beyond the functionality that exists, it’s tough to expect everyone to do what you want before claiming the reward. We’re definitely continuing to develop the features, though, and we’ll look at ways to allow for even more control. Right now, though, if you’re a Mission creator and you want to drive activity on YouTube as part of your Mission, I would just reward the specific actions we can currently track. Otherwise you’re asking people to do stuff the system doesn’t yet support, and I don’t think you should expect people to actually do it all. As much as I’d love for everyone to thoroughly read a Mission and do exactly what’s asked
Hope that helps!
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YouTube Missions are live folks get in and give them a go. Mr Pirillo was first in from what i can tell
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hmmm… major bug! – you can simply start playing the video and then click the end of the video and the buttons come ALIVE! YAY!
click it and you’re done with the mission! 
just so you know!
how are you guys planning to fix this? I feel this is as good as the feature not being there in the first place! basically rendering this update pointless.
it is absolutely impossible to actually be sure that the person’s actually played the entire video.
i’d be very keen to know to how tackle this major bug.
This is an awesome idea! This will be a great avenue to promote Wahooly! YouTube will be a huge social media tool in 2012.
Hey Savio,
Thanks for the feedback. We are testing an opt in solution to your input which should be live soon.
Thanks
Ric
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