YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Views and Ratings

YouTube, for the most part, is a numbers game. View counts are often used as the benchmark of a video's success or failure in this game. Of course, we don't consider a video a "failure" if it doesn't get a lot of hits; sometimes just the act of making it has its own rewards. And sometimes you'll want to make a video private when it's intended for only a few friends and family. (Read more on this in the "Privating: Covering Your Online Tracks" section.) But a lot of people do look at numbers as success or failure.

YouTube communicates how important video views are in numerous ways. First, YouTube defaults all of its top video lists to display the Most Viewed videos for each category. If you're looking for Comedy, the first group of videos displayed is not necessarily the funniest or those eliciting the largest reaction, but those that are Most Viewed.

Note

The Most Viewed, Most Discussed, Top Rated, and other top video lists are a great way to earn some very visible inbound links, so landing on them should be a goal. Each hour spent in one of the top 20 slots on the Most Viewed page, for instance, can earn you between 10,000 and 30,000 views!

Second, YouTube displays the view count for each video as the largest item beneath your video (see Figure 7-1), drawing attention first to how many people have watched and second to how many have commented, rated, or favorited.