Before you get caught up in making your videos, it would be wise to watch what has come before you. Just as no great artist emerges without a few drawing classes, I believe it's important for you to be exposed to previous videos that have worked and a few that haven't. This book is full of links to wonderful videos, and if you've already bookmarked the links page from the preface, www.viralvideowannabe.com/ytlinks (URL 1.2), feel free to click any of them before finding them in the book. You may want to take a moment, put this book down, and watch a few of those videos.
If, instead, you're looking for a video on a specific subject, the best place to start is YouTube's search function (see Figure 1-1).
Near the top of almost every page on YouTube, you will find the search function. From here, you can search for videos or channels. For general searches, this works great. But if you want to refine your search (perhaps you're looking for a certain video you saw last week but can't remember the name or who made it), there are the advanced search functions. Simply click the word advanced to the right of the Search button, and the options shown in Figure 1-2 appear.
The advanced search functions allow you to search using numerous criteria to help refine your search. YouTube has millions of videos, and it's very likely that even a specific search could return dozens of videos that match your search criteria. Use the advanced features as often as you can.
Another popular, though less reliable, way to find videos is the Related Videos feature on YouTube. After each video you watch, a list of eight related videos appears, rotating two videos at a time (see Figure 1-3 and Figure 1-4).
Google has a history of keeping its search algorithms (the processes it uses to choose search results, or, in this case, related videos) a closely guarded secret, so there is no way to say with certainty how the related videos are chosen. I've watched this process in operation over a few weeks, and it appears that when you create a video and upload it on YouTube, related videos are determined based on the tags and titles you assigned to it. Later, the process updates, and new related videos appear, based on what users watched just before or just after they watched your video.
The related videos, as with most of YouTube, seem to be a level playing field, meaning your video with 20 views could easily place right beside the latest viral video with 200,000 views. It's this level playing field that keeps new YouTubers hopeful; without it, the same channels would receive promotion time and time again, and the content would quickly become stale. Later in this chapter, Michael will discuss some of the pros and cons of this level playing field.
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