Popularity of different video sources

[Xarex]

How many of you here are not using many videos from YouTube but rather other sources? Are you noticing a different in popularity to your own site?

My daily traffic is about 130 visitors per day and seems to be rising. But the problem I'm having is retaining people, getting them to return. I write a daily blog review on an artist about every week to a week and a half. I do get hits on those articles.

A friend of mine said that the reason people might not be staying, contributing, or even commenting is because they know they can go straight to YouTube to find the video and comment on it. This is very true and probably the problem with PHP Melody sites -- unless, of course, you upload your own videos and have your own video site going on.

Me, however.. I'm using it more for categorization, easy access, and finding music without having to do too much searching. And especially the videos I'm finding and "specializing" in.. is more of the trippy psychdelic videos, which definitely do get hits. I am loving the SEO friendliness of PHP Melody. I add new videos and just within a few hours, my sites are listed on Google. Definitely a great feature of PHP Melody. The majority of my traffic comes from search engines. Sometimes even before the YouTube video pops up.

But I'm not sure I agree with my friend completely about just using YouTube. Sure, they can go search YouTube for more videos. But I do see in the searches -- also another great feature that comes with PHP Melody -- what people are actually looking for, so I can go search video sites and find that type of music, and it helps me discover new music too. Or maybe the fact is.. people just don't want to stick around long enough to comment. More just watching a video or two and leaving. I'm wondering if YouTube has a similar pattern. And I guess I can notice that from my own behavior -- sometimes I'll stay on YouTube and comment. other times, I just leave. Might come back later and comment, but certainly not always.


99.9% of my sites do come from YouTube -- the Mass Embed feature surely helps sway my decision to use YouTube. But I'm just wondering how people are retaining their visitors, getting people to return. For a while, my comments was broken. I'm temporarily using DISQUS, which I think is open to commenting. But might require signup. It's why I don't emphasize sign up on my own site, seeing as it's not very necessary.


So another thing I'm curious about -- are you noticing people liking or coming to your site more often, visiting pages that DON'T USE YouTube videos? Or does this not really make a difference?

[muzikia]

Nice analysis, Xarex.

I have a different opinion though.
I think that is about establishing a community, a niche only yours. (this is your case)
For instance, I like history: let's say I will make a history website. From all the historical periods I would choose The Second World War.

Having a Video website about World War Two means:
- getting all videos about it from all the sources
- thinking 3 times about the categories
- writing articles about it
- setting up a forum
- setting up a photo archive gallery

So, my website is valuable by getting together all the resources.
My fundamental target will (in this case) to get all the possible visitors (interested in WW2) to my website.


Until now I visited only one niche PHM website that has crazy traffic: it has already 150.000 members (70% active) and around 6000-7000 visitors/day. Madness. And that guy even dont visit the forum: it is too busy updating his website.
It has only a changed template, no special speed optimizations and some dedicated plugins (payments things).
But he got his community. Which is really wonderful!

PS: I have myself a video website (since 2008 !, all kind of music, one plugin there lol): it wasnt updated since last year and I get around 1000 visitors/day. It isnt a niche website but it works though because the music was premium (at that time)

Comments?
what about them ? I would really like to have visitors and not comments :"I like this video" / "Yes it is nice". This is all about. Just let them comment if they want. If dont, no problem.

Briefly ?
Answer yourself this question:
Why should I visit your website next time ?

[dhunt]

It's all about PR. Youtube has a huge content. But to get to the content you want, you need to wade through the mirad of crap. You have to advertise your site.

You are doing the right thing on Trippy. You are exchanging links where everyone benefits. By exchanging links with totally dissimilar sites of like qualities, you get more hits.

I have noticed a few things.

The Searches is mostly made up of people trying to pirate the latest and greatest. Since my site has mostly Public Domain on it, you won't find it. But they keep trying. Most of the rest are from people looking for military Aircraft information and I do have a ton of that. Outside of Youtube, I may have the largest collection on the Internet of Military Air videos.

While having the same public domain files as a couple of public domain areas, the junk is trimmed. It makes it much faster to go directly to the movie itself. I just got through loading up a bunch of Carey Grant, Gregory Peck and the Bowery Boys/East End Kids, Dead End Kids and a few others. No junk to sift through. If you want to purchase a DVD for the Bower Boys, I have a link for you to do so. Same goes for at least a few westerns.

What keeps them on the site? Mostly, nothing. Lookyloos looking to steal something you don't want to keep on your system. What keeps the ones that keep coming back (I have about a 70% return rate)? Good programming.

G is hard to sell on the Internet. But if you wish to survive for any length of time it's the way to go. Maybe PG-13. But the downside is, if you wish to have a R site you are going to get more traffic but you will find that NONE of it is public domain and those videos are aggressively prosecuted.

So, we sell our sites and draw the crowd that wishes to see our wares. How to do that? Now, that's the hard part.

Youtube is not the way to sell your site. The more you sell your site with Youtube the more people you hand over to Youtube.

[Xarex]

Nice to hear from you guys. I hope your sites are so far successful.

A huge thing I notice is that once in a while, my site will get a heap load of traffic. And what happens is, I use my Twitter account to go over random videos... posting about it, as if I'm just sharing a link with friends. If i had more time, I'd do it more often, but about 2-5 videos a day that are psychedelic or whatever. I'll post it on Twitter.

One time, I posted a new video that came out -- it was a Snoop Dogg video. I began getting lots of traffic. I searched the Internet, realized he posted a link to his video on my site on his own Twitter (maybe not him, but his publicist or whatever). And recently, I got another spike in hits -- realized that another band posted a link to one of their videos on my site.

So with my site, it's publicity for celebs and it's publicity for me when they post a link to my site. I am both specialized and have very general topics as well. This is simply to lure in many people who have different tastes in music and might come back to discover the more specialized areas that I write about.

I am looking for the community. It takes time to get it. And I haven't been able to focus on it as much as I used to. But I just recently created a new Facebook account that is strictly for my site. And every few days, I add a couple dozen people. I can't get people to Like my Facebook page, but at least if I can start showing up in some of their feeds, they might become daily visitors. Since I've created this, what's happening is that people are starting to add me as their friends, which is helping in hopefully getting them interested in what the site is about.

So I'm just thinking of new ways of advertising. I've looked into newsletters and would love to start it, but at the moment, I don't have the time.

A website takes time to mature and for people to catch on. I knew that when I was creating it, I was targeting a specific audience (stoners), but then i realized other music pertained to other audiences too -- older generations love classic rock music, and a whole other crowd loves the rap and hip hop music.

I just have to go searching through other sites as well. I'm sure there is so much that YouTube can't cover. What made me even attempt to come up with this site and go through with it .. was the fact that I was constantly searching YouTube for new music. And there's tons of it. But where is it featured on YouTube? No one goes over it. What do you normally see in the Featured Section on YouTube? Shaytards? Or some other non-music related crap? YouTube isn't directed towards music. They're more interested in personal vlogs of people and other crap like that.

And that is what gives PHP Melody a great existence on the Internet and helps us with what we seek to do: Give people categorization and specialized areas that they can come visit without having to search too hard for what they want to enjoy.

[dhunt]

Well said, X.

My site is really only 2 months and 5 days old now. I did a complete change and started all over when I went to a new server. But it's growing slowly.

I note that sites that are 2 or 3 years old are doing better. Well, some of them anyway. Time accounts for quite a bit on the Internet. I don't expect it to go BANG one day. It's a gradual affect with all the things involved we are both talking about.

You advertise in a very affective internet manner. I need to get better at that. What people overlook is, internet advertising is, for the most part, free. You can pay some else to do it for you but it's more affective if you do the Social Sites (never thought I would say this) more than anything else. (get the mouthwash, soap, kerosene and gargle it after that statement). Old dogs can learn.

I thought it was important to have the #1 spot on Google or Yahoo. Not so anymore. It is important but not as important as it once was. X has opened quite a gift box.

Locally, I am going to spend more time on now. Advertising isn't free in that venue. It costs less to advertise nationally than locally but you really need to do both. Time to exchange some info with a few local businesses that put out news to their customers.

[Trace]

Google is important but social things are just as important.
Facebook/twitter is known of course, but I never heard of stumbleupon before it showed up in my stats.

This might be interesting for people


Note that we are very active on both Facebook and Twitter (every new video gets posted there automatically).

Stumbleupon gives a lot of visits but it contributes a lot less to the pageviews (high bounce rate).

As for the video source, we use whatever is available. Ranges from YouTube and Google Video to a dozen of chinese/russian sites

[Andrew]

Thanks for sharing this Trace; interesting to see Stumbleupon gaining users. They've been around for quite a while.
Stumbleupon is great but, as you pointed out, there was always the problem of high bounce rate.

[KateDaring52]

Many thanks to ur post. I love it.


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[brigada]

I checked my stats, i get 61% from google, i'm a bit disappointed in twitter though, it hardly yields visitors, although i have like 250 followers. Even my phpsugar posts give more visitors! 99% of my videos are from youtube btw.

It seems the higher the pagerank, the higher the organic searches get

[Xarex]

Twitter is amazing for getting your site out there though brigada. Believe me, people are searching Twitter and find your links on Twitter either through Google or a search. That's how I found one of the videos on my site.. which was receiving a mass load of visitors. The reason? Snoop Dogg's twitter retweeted a song I had of his.

Weird that i took it from YouTube. Why didn't he just take it from YouTube? Means him or someone was trollin' thru my site and liked the fact that his videos were on a site that wasn't just YouTube. I think that video brought in 200 visitors in 2 days.

Trust me, use Twitter. You might not think people are watching you or following your links, but eventually they will.

[dhunt]

Good advice X. I started using Twitter as well as facebook. The google hits went up. I need to get more active in it.

Facebook has been good to me though. I post in there and get an upsurge of hits. Some stay, most don't.

Muz should fall in love with my site. It's got a ton of WWII stuff and I wish I had more. I stopped relying on Youtube. They kept moving the stuff around. Now, I go for downloads instead and am moving away from youtube. What I have from Youtube stays but there is a whole lot more to be had.

I now have about 100 gigs of movies, tv and Documentaries. By having them on the system, they paint faster on the users end than trying Youtube. I hate that choppiness that you sometimes get from there.

Your site, and most of the others, are pretty well tied in with Youtube. Mine isn't because of the subject matter. Since most of what is put out is actually from the Library of Congress no one can complain when I put it up off the home disk. I had one complain but they were just repackaging Library of Congress and calling it Copyrighted. They can take a flying leap. I remove their crap at the beginning and only present the Library of Congress stuff. Drives them nuts. And I find them not too honest to boot. I imagine they tried to run it past my provider. Bet the provider had a big laugh on that.

Well, Muz, you are very welcome to come onto the site and take a good look. Chances are there is something there you haven't seen. Especially my new area of Propaganda stuff and PC.

So X, you keep voicing what you are doing. Many of us can learn from you.

[muzikia]

@dhunt: didi several times and i like it

[dhunt]

You do know you are welcome anytime.

I am wondering what affect WWII had on India. It would be nice including something about that.

I am more of a historian than a movie and tv place. The Movies and TV are not the bread and butter of the site. It's the war history. But I still spend time on the things other than Military and War for those with "Weaker" Stomachs.