My channel has been top100 views for Gurus and Gaming for a while now, but I’ve never had an individual video in the top100 for Gaming. Until now. Without even noticing it, TITOL1 is #73 all time in Gaming. Which makes it 1 of 4 flash games in the top100 (Red Remover walkthrough, Pandemic 2 instructions, Wake Up The Box walkthrough). Here’s to hoping on getting many more vids in there.

On my top portals/devs list, I only included my own videos. I was debating including games I did not do the videos for in this list (Red Remover, Cover Orange, etc)… but decided that I couldn’t make it all-inclusive, and therefore I should not include it. So here is the list of games that I’ve done videos for that have over 1 million total video views:

That’s the full list. 7 games. Hopefully there will be some new additions soon.

I spent some time on 2/17/10 compiling a spreadsheet of my top 100 videos, their aprox viewcount (rounded down to closest 1000), sponsor, developer, and whether the video was featured in-game or not. From there, I tabulated the top sponsors and the top developers (only calculated devs with 3+ videos in top 100, unless they have 800k+ views).

I have 450+ total videos, so this is less than 25% of my total videos… but these 100 account for over 22 million of my 27+ million views, so they are a fairly accurate representation of the whole. Obviously, the farther down the list you look, the less accurate it is (like LegitGames having 1 video on there, but they have 2 others that just missed the cut).

Any questions or additional data you guys would like to see? I did not include the raw list of top 100, nor did I do any analysis of in-game vs not in-game. And TITOL2 is not counted in this list for Armor or jmtb.

So after all this type and posts and whatnot… the game is now out. Play it. Post comments telling me your thoughts on it.

Play TITOL2 here on Tasselfoot.com. Play TITOL2 on Armor Games.

If you need assistance (you probably will… the game is harder than the first!), try this.

I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of doing videos in multiple segments. Because it’s a decision that has to be made on every game that I work on… and should be considered by anyone else who makes walkthroughs. There are a few choices: 1) Show the entire game in 1 video. 2) Split the game up into a few videos. 3) Do 1 video per level.

1 video per game:
-Simple. Viewers only need to click on 1 video, and they get everything they need. Can make it more difficult to find 1 specific level. May intimidate potential viewers by how long the video is or they may get bored and stop watching. Likely will only get 1 view/person out of the game. Non-partners capped at 11 minutes, so may need to edit out some content or speed up the footage.
-I recommend doing 1 video per game on very short games that do not have levels, specifically point and clicks and room escapes. I’ll also try to only do 1 video for games that I don’t think people will be very interested in and I can make them reasonable in length (ala Blox).

A few videos per game:
-This is what I like to do, when possible. You’re not going to upset your subscribers if you pump out 2-3 videos for 1 game. With a few videos, you can keep the length down while keeping the footage at 1x speed. You’ll also likely get multiple views per game this way. It’s a balance between being a greedy view whore and keeping your viewers happy and focused. Bite sized pieces, instead of everything at once.
-I try to do 2 videos for a game, ideally. As mentioned, it doesn’t make sense to do it with point and click type games… and some other types of games wouldn’t make sense to split the footage either. But most level-based games work to have the content split. They can find a specific level quickly if they want or get half the game in a few minutes. Multiple views per game is also very nice, but watch the greed.

1 video per level:
-Ultimate ease of finding the level you’re stuck on. Extremely short videos. Tons of views per person per game. Lots of extra time in editing, rendering, and uploading. Likely will piss off subscribers from the flood of videos at one time. A pain for users if they want to watch the entire game.
-I really don’t recommend doing this. It’s enough work to edit and upload 1 or 2 videos, but doing it for a game with 30 or 40 levels is just a royal headache. The times I’ve done 6-7 videos for 1 game have all resulted in me losing about 10 subscribers… people do not like getting flooded with content from 1 person. Sure, you’ll get extra views out of it, but is that worth the scorn of your viewers?

In the end, it’s about judgment. Different games make sense having different numbers of vids for them. To me, it’s common sense. But make sure to balance your desire for views with your audience’s wish for simplicity. I’d say to always err on the side of too few as opposed to too many. When I’ve done 6-7 videos per game, it was almost always out of greed, and it hasn’t worked out for me yet. I’ve really tried to stop doing that, and keep it to 4 videos max per game… ideally 2.

So today (Monday), I woke up to This Is The Only Level having 2 million views. And just now, 45 minutes before midnight, my total viewcount hit 25 million.

I reached 10 million views on 8/8, which means I did 15 million views in a week under 6 months. Which is a bit over 2.5 million views/month for that stretch. A bit worse than my 5-10 mil stretch (7 weeks), but that was also only a 5 million gap instead of a 15 million one. Harder to sustain the views. Either way, I’m quite happy. Ideally, I’d love to average 100k/day, but I’ll take ~83k/hr for that long of a timeframe.

Interesting note: TITOL vid was released 8/7, 1 day before I hit 10 mil views. Which means, basically, 2 of those 15 million views came from 1 video. Oddly, Insight has TITOL at 12.9% of my views for the past 6 months, when I’d think it would be 13.3%… although as I said, the time frame is 1 week under 6 months, so that is the likely cause of the discrepancy.

January was shaping up to be a very bad month for me… worst since June, when my content still hadn’t really taken off yet. Then this weekend happened, and while the month was still sub-par compared to the previous few, it at least made it respectable. Why was January going to be such a bad month? A few reasons that I can think of… I was away for almost 3 weeks at the end of Dec / start of Jan, and made almost no videos in that time. Between Dec 11th and Jan 14th, I didn’t have a single monetized video do even 50k views… and all told, I only made about 20 vids. Not many games released over the holidays, and those weren’t very good. Also kids off from school go away on vacation during this time, etc etc.

This weekend changed that. The past 7-10 days, some good games started to hit my plate… i remain, werebox, and foreign creature 2. The planets aligned, you could say. The result was 3 of my 4 best days in terms of both ad impressions and money made (excluding my one crazy click-fraud day) and 3 of my 5 best days ever in terms of views (including #1). First, weekends always produce more views than weekdays… for obvious reasons. But what happened this weekend to cause this massive jump? Let’s look at these graphs I pulled from Insight:

(ignore that it says 1/30/10… for some reason Insight always displays the graphs as 1 day earlier than they actually are).

The least expected, and biggest, reason for this weekend’s success is that Addicting Games added This Is The Only Level to their site on Friday, leaving in the walkthrough link in-game. This pulled in 40k+ hits alone, each day… compared to the 4-6k/day it had been doing for the past few months. Second, WereBox… although I’m not 100% sure why yet. It’s on BubbleBox, but didn’t take off until 3-4 days after release. It’s on a few other mid-large portals (notdoppler, gamesfree.ca, etc), but none of the largest ones (just went onto Kong today)… yet it pulled in 25-30k for the past 3 days. Third, i remain was given a completion badge on Kongregate on the 26th (Tues), so it was already starting to taper off by the weekend. It also has yet to hit any of the other large portals. So those 3 alone were 80-85k/day views (out of the 150-160k for each day). Add to it Foreign Creature 2, Cargo Bridge Armor Edition, Alice is Dead Ep2, and Demo City 2 all contributing 5k+ each and then 400 other videos, it works out to 150-160k a day.

Basically, what this says to me is that this was one hell of a weekend… and it might not be over with yet. Numbers are definitely dropping big time today, as expected, but when WereBox and i remain hit the other large portals, it should jump their numbers big time. Plus I have 2 videos sitting finished on my desktop for Kongregate (one probably won’t do very well, the other will do at least decently with upside potential to do well). I have 2 games waiting to hit my desk for another site, one of which will do VERY well. And, let’s not forget about TITOL2… which might be released as early as Friday of this week.

Posted to my Sacred Seasons UWA speedrun vid (which is now sorely out of date, given the levels some people are… but even with that same group of 5 we were doing 1 minute faster, anyway):

2010azam writes:
“may i have the account please ? ^.^ i’d appreciate it very much . main:Savage level 138 alt:Desert Bandit level 16 lol ”

Let’s disect:
-My SS account is linked to my Kongregate account. It can only be played via Kongregate. To get access to my SS account, you’d have to have access to my Kong account. So, uh… strike 1.
-I’m a moderator on SS, assuming they haven’t de-modded me for inactivity. Kinda would be a slightly abuse of trust to give away my account when it has the ability to kick/ban people. Strike 2.
-While it’s no longer one of the highest leveled accounts in the game (I was #1 at one point, now #24), it’s still got to have some worth to it… level 560+, great class, name recognition, sacred sword + over 40,000 gold. To just give it away would be silly. Strike 3.
-And just to rub it in a wee bit more, I have no idea who this dude is. If I was, for some crazy reason, going to give my account away… I’d give it to someone I know, like, and trust.
-Oh yeah… that weird chibi emoti-face thing. WTF is that. And lack of any sort of spacing/capitalization formatting.
-6th and final reason: Tasselfoot Theory of Usernames strikes again.

So congrats 2010azam, I haven’t seen a comment that retarded on one of my vids in a long time.

On Friday, Dan asked me to whip up some trailers for Armor’s 4 iPhone games.  I agreed, but always with that small pit in the back of my stomach that I get when I’m making trailers.  Before this weekend, I’d only produced 2 trailers…  1 for Gemcraft Ch0 and 1 for a not-very-popular Rudy Sudarto game.  When it comes to walkthroughs, I’m completely comfortable… the editing for them is straightforward, and no creativity is needed.  For trailers, however, it helps to have solid editing skills and creativity is definitely needed.

So Dan wanted me to make the trailers from actual iPhone footage, as opposed to screen-recorded play of iPhone versions of the games.  This created another issue, as I don’t have any sort of set-up for easily doing that.  Using some thin books and a pair of steady hands, I did my best to record a bunch of gameplay footage.  Then it was off to the editing room!  I went with a simple premise for each of the vids…  Intro, 4-5 screens of text followed by appropriate gameplay to match, End screen.  I tried to make them all funny, yet keep in line with the game itself.

Please watch them and give me feedback.  It will be most appreciated.  Especially if you tell me they don’t suck.  Click the “more” link directly below to get to the playlist embed (it has all 4 trailers in 1 embed):

(continue reading…)

I’ve started work on Tass Approved GAMES, the portal side of this site.  So far, I have 1 game up for you…  a personal favorite…  This Is The Only Level by jmtb02.  I’ll make sure to keep everyone up to date as I continue to add more games to the site (I’ve got about 70 picked out so far).  As I’ve mentioned, I’m open to suggestions on future games to add.  I’m also open to suggestions and constructive criticism for the page layouts.  So please post comments telling me what you like, what you don’t, and why.

To go along with the games, I’ve added a walkthrough section to the site.  I’ll try to add a walkthrough for every game… even if I didn’t make it.

Thanks and enjoy TITOL!  A small fairy has told me to be on the lookout for a sequel in the coming weeks.  PLAY THIS IS THE ONLY LEVEL NOW.