Post
by CrackTheSky » Mon Jun 23, 2014 3:18 pm
I don't really use/participate in YouTube any more than I need to, so I can't comment on how the community over there works. There are several others here much more active on YouTube who can provide better insight, so I'll leave that to them.
Instead, I'll comment on this community, which I'm much more familiar with, as I believe that there are some parallels that can be drawn. I've been here since mid-2006, when this place was booming with activity and tens (if not hundreds) of videos were being uploaded daily. Back then, it took a mixture of things to get recognized -- if you simply uploaded a video and did nothing with it, you had very, very little chance of getting noticed at all. Unless someone who was already well-known somehow stumbled across your video and advertised it, your chances of breaking into the "mainstream" were practically nil. It did happen occasionally that certain editors were "discovered" almost purely by accident, but this was rare.
However, the .org provides a couple places to advertise your own work -- namely, the forums and journals (the latter of which are all but completely unused these days). Anyone who wanted exposure could always go there and post their work and hope for feedback. If the video was good but you were an unknown editor, you were much more likely to have the big names telling everyone else about your video in places like the IRC channel and you'd get more views (discovering new editors was fun!). Even then, this would amount to *maybe* a couple hundred hits on your video page, and a proportionate number of video downloads.
If your video was really good, you might get lucky and have someone from another AMV community (typically from a non-English speaking country) see the video and then advertise it on their community's forum, and your video could spread that way. It may not have been too rare for this to happen, but it was rare that you'd get any kind of significant exposure this way. A (comparatively) few dedicated editors would see and love your video and tell their friends but this was a limited market, so to speak.
The real way to get exposure was (and still is) by showing it at cons. If your video is memorable enough, people who visit cons will see it and then look it up when they get home. They'll download it or favorite it on their YouTube profiles and tell their AMV-loving friends who weren't at the con, and it can spread that way. You really have to send your videos to a lot of cons to get a lot of exposure, but think about it -- this is a place where, if your video makes it into the contest, it will be screened to a decent-sized audience. They'll watch it, because that's why they're sitting in that room in the first place -- to watch AMVs!
This is how popular editors (at least on the .org) got popular. I assume it still happens this way, but things have shifted to YouTube a lot so I don't know for sure if it does. Once you release a video or two that gets popular this way, you'll have enough people who know your name and will view whatever future videos you release because your name has become synonymous with enjoyable videos in the past. The fact of the matter is that simply releasing videos is not enough. It doesn't matter how much time, energy, and effort you devote to making your video. If exposure is what you want, you have to work for it. Participate on the forums here, announce your videos in the announcement forum, do op exchanges, hang out in the Skype chat, and send your videos to cons.
As I said, I can't comment on the YouTube community but I would venture to say that starting out there, you're a much smaller fish in a much, much bigger sea. You're not going to get popular over there simply by force of will. Your videos will HAVE to be seen somewhere else, or you'll HAVE to make your name known through other channels and hope that filters over to YouTube. Getting noticed on YouTube is something I wouldn't even know how to begin doing, it's so massive and de-localized.
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Edit to say that this is all from observation, not really experience (I was never exactly a popular editor myself so none of this ever really happened to me firsthand). Your mileage my vary significantly.
