December 06, 2006

Dude, Where's My YouTube Video Ranking?!?!?

As you may know, the exposure a particular video gets from YouTube is directly related to its traffic and its ratings. High-rated and high-traffic videos are featured on the main pages, while lower-rated and lower-traffic vids are kept in the "back room." In other words, for those of us who make videos to get a message out to the broader public, high ratings and high traffic are pretty important in order to be heard above the YouTube "noise." It is particularly good to be high on the "daily" pages, since all the YouTube video browsing pages default to "today."

Yesterday, around 1:30 pm, I posted this to The Jawa Report:

Thanks to everyone who viewed and/or linked to "Flight Club," our latest video now shows up on the front page under "Videos" at YouTube. It is today's #3 in traffic for the News & Blogs category.

Thanks to all of you who took the time to rate it and favorite it, it is today's #1 Top Rated YouTube video and today's #2 Top Favorite.

Even better, this video is poised to become one of the top ranked videos that will show up when you search for "CAIR" on YouTube.

Why is this important? It's important because getting on the high-rank pages on YouTube means the message gets out to folks that may not be big blog readers. That's what these videos are an attempt to do.

Again, I sincerely thank each and every one of you who took the time to make your voice heard in this small battle in the larger online war.

At present, this video is still this week's #1 Top Rated YouTube video in the weekly "News & Blogs" category. This video is also this week's #2 Top Favorite YouTube video in the weekly "News & Blogs" category.

How did the video get to the top of the weekly rankings in a single day? Because the video got a MASSIVE wave of traffic yesterday. Approximately 50,000 hits--which is quite a bit of traffic for a YouTube video.

Given this, why did the video disappear from all the daily Top 100 rankings right in the middle of its biggest day? To be fair, it could've just been a computer glitch. Then again, it could've been something intentional. Maybe YouTube didn't like that yesterday's Top Rated YouTube video was so politically incorrect. I have no way of knowing which it is. For now, I'll be keeping an eye out for similar behavior as re: other counter-jihadi videos on YouTube.