Читать книгу The YouTube Formula - Derral Eves - Страница 19

In 2007, while the big copyright problem was simmering down, YouTube added two features that would make a similarly huge impact on its future. These features would be problematic in some ways, but also they would significantly change advertising and how creators could make a living from YouTube. Which features could be this consequential? (1) In‐video advertisements and (2) the Partner Program.

Advertisements on YouTube have evolved a lot over time. They used to be display ads or they appeared underneath the content, but with these changes, ads would pop up right in the content where the viewer was looking. And now the creator of that content could be compensated via ad revenue sharing. This is how the YouTube Partner Program began. Creators became super motivated to make good content that would get more viewers watching, because now, more views equaled more money. Creators and businesses really wanted to be YouTube Partners!

Unfortunately, this also meant that creators realized they could use tactics to get people to click on their videos, even if those tactics were divertive. Their aggressive “bait‐and‐switch” strategies included misleading titles, sensational thumbnails, and superficial content that strayed from the original purpose of the video. They wanted to get people to click on their videos at any cost so they could produce revenue from the ads being integrated with their content.

Let's not forget the first member in the YouTube ecosystem here: the viewer. This new ad sharing program created a big problem with viewer satisfaction. People began spending less time on YouTube because of the in‐your‐face ads and because of clickbaiting that hinted at what they were looking for but actually didn't satisfy that end at all in the content itself. In short, viewers felt tricked and unsatisfied.

In addition, many YouTube viewers got angry at these “sell‐out” creators who ran ads in conjunction with their content. They even went so far as to join channel boycott movements against creators. Seeing ads today is just part of the online experience, but back then, it was such a big deal that it interrupted the ecosystem.

As you can see, the integration of the Partner Program further complicated YouTube's delicate ecosystem. Keeping advertisers happy was an obvious priority because that's where the money came from, but YouTube also had to keep creators and viewers happy to achieve this, and the task was proving to be extremely difficult. Creators wanted their fair share in ad revenue without being labeled a sell‐out, and viewers wanted to watch content without feeling tricked or sitting through ads on every video.

Let's pause here for a minute. Before we run away with all the problems the Partner Program created, I want to emphasize how monumental its existence was. Google had pioneered advertisement revenue sharing with its AdSense program, and they implemented that program with YouTube. They took it to another level going from display ads to video ads, because video ads were more effective. They could charge advertisers more money for video ads, so YouTube made more money this way. Because YouTube didn't create their own website content, they had to incentivize creators to make good content that would get people coming to the platform.

AdSense was the origin of advertisement revenue sharing. This was absolutely uncharted territory! It was like the great California gold rush, but it was the gold rush for digital marketing in the twenty‐first century. Companies had never offered a portion of their revenue to the general public before!

YouTube said, more or less, “Hey folks, if you make good content that viewers will come and watch on our website, we'll share some of the advertisement money we get with you.”

And creators were like, “Wait, really? You mean I can get compensated for my hobby? Potentially earning enough that I can replace my boring nine‐to‐five income doing something I actually like, and can make more money doing? Well, then I'm going to make the best darn videos you ever saw!” And the gold rush was on. The channel owners grabbed their pickaxes, installed sluice gates, and started panning for gold.

So many creators, businesses, and advertisers saw the potential for massive payout with ad sharing, and they wanted in. The risk was that they might not actually make any money if they didn't get viewers, but the opportunity was worth the risk, and it paid off big for so many of them. This was a genius move by YouTube! They were enlisting a worldwide army of creators to do the grunt work to get visitors to their website for a piece of the revenue. Channel owners were ready to compete against each other for a chunk of the gold.

Advertising companies could get into this market very inexpensively. They could track their market, get a lot of eyes on their product quickly without expensive campaigns, and they could do it for literally a fraction of traditional marketing cost. A lot of big brands and businesses gave it a snooty pass because they just didn't realize what they were missing in the beginning. They were too good for it.

One of my favorite examples of a YouTube advertising success story comes from a product called Orabrush. Orabrush is a tongue cleaner that was invented in the early 2000s by a guy named Robert Wagstaff, aka “Dr. Bob.” Dr. Bob had tried to market his tongue cleaner via traditional product‐pitching means, but the companies he approached wanted nothing to do with it. He even invested a lot of his personal money to run an infomercial. It flopped. So at the ripe old age of 75, Dr. Bob turned to a marketing class at his local university and asked if anybody had any bright ideas.

My good friend Jeffrey Harmon was a student in that class, and he told Dr. Bob that he thought they could sell the product online with a YouTube video. He took on the tongue cleaner project with the promise of Dr. Bob's personal motorcycle as payment for the campaign. Jeffrey and some creative friends made their YouTube video for just a few hundred dollars, and it went viral. People wanted to know where they could buy Orabrush in their own locations, and distributors started to pay attention.

An ad campaign like this had never been done on YouTube, but Jeffrey saw its potential. “We took a product from zero sales anywhere to worldwide distribution,” Jeffrey told me. “And we didn't do it with traditional marketing. It was 100% YouTube. We couldn't have made it happen any other way.” Orabrush became a multimillion‐dollar brand that is sold in more than two dozen countries in 30,000‐plus stores.

For the record, Orabrush's YouTube channel has more than 38 million video views to date. For a tongue brush. Orabrush was acquired by DenTek in 2015.

YouTube leveled the playing field for a small‐town, old‐man inventor and a few college kids. They had access to the market that was simply unavailable to regular people before YouTube. It literally changed the trajectory of their lives. Jeffrey Harmon became cofounder and chief marketing officer at Orabrush and has gone on to cofound the Harmon Brothers marketing agency with his three brothers, where they have created extremely successful online campaigns for PooPourri, Squatty Potty, Purple, Lume, and many more businesses. Others who worked on the original campaign also have made successful careers out of the path that was set from Orabrush's beginning.

Another friend of mine, Shay Carl Butler, began his YouTube career way back in 2006 and was one of the original Partners, so if anyone has a good handle on how the program began and how it has changed ever since, it would be him. “The YouTube Partner Program was so exciting in the beginning, and everyone who knew about it wanted a piece,” Shay Carl said. “YouTube had a lot of problems to work out. I remember when it seemed like everybody was mad at some point: viewers were mad at creators, creators were mad at creators, viewers and creators were mad at YouTube, and so on. But YouTube has done a good job overall of working out the kinks.” Shay Carl's personal channel is where he began in 2006, but he started his family channel, Shaytards, in 2008, and it has become the main YouTube lifeline for his family with around five million subscribers to date. We'll go into more detail about the Partner Program in Chapter 6.

Because of this “digital gold rush” and the amount of creators and advertisers it brought in, YouTube was not equipped to respond to the masses. This is where the multichannel networks came in. MCNs offered to be the go‐between for other contributors in the YouTube ecosystem in exchange for a piece of the profit. They helped creators and businesses with audience growth, resources for production, and brand opportunities. They matched advertisers with channels that suited their particular products or services. They dealt with rights management. They gave YouTube some breathing room to worry about other things. MCNs have had both good press and bad, but they did alleviate a lot of YouTube's headaches in those formative years of ad revenue sharing.

I recently sat down with Jim Louderback, CEO of VidCon and former CEO of MCN company Revision3, and talked with him about multichannel networks on my podcast Creative Disruption. He talked about how MCNs affected the early years of YouTube's ad revenue explosion. We discussed the ways they helped, but also the problems they created. “In the end,” said Jim, “a lot of MCNs did not provide the value they offered. They brought on too many creators and brands to manage, and there wasn't enough revenue to go around.”

Once YouTube had a better handle on operations, they offered their own Partner support rather than losing creators to outside MCNs. In 2011, YouTube acquired Next New Networks, a company that had been managing a lot of YouTube's early creators. YouTube was ready to take back control internally and put that money back into their own pocket. For this reason and others—like fewer creators signing up, and a smaller margin of revenue per view—MCNs have seen a significant decline on YouTube in recent years.