Last week, YouTube opened up their video ad program to all partners. I’ve been waiting for this for over a year now, and have implemented video ads into about 100 of my videos. Unfortunately, video ads seem to be for on-YouTube views only… which means the 70% of my views that take place off-YouTube won’t have them.

If any of you have seen some of these ads appear since yesterday… what are your thoughts on them? Are they too intrusive? Will you still watch videos despite having to wait 15 seconds for them to load?

From time to time I need assistance in creating the walkthroughs that I make. Either from lack of skill, time, whatever… reason isn’t important.

I have a large number of people who I trust that help me when all I need is a solution that I can duplicate after having it explained or shown to me. However, I only have a small number of people who are able to assist me should I need them to create raw video themselves.

That is what I’m looking for. To increase my list of possible assistants for whenever a project comes along that I need someone else to do the recording.

What you need to do:
-Email a resume to Tasselfoot@gmail.com explaining your gaming skills. Include accomplishments, badges earned, speedruns, etc. Examples of your videos are highly encouraged.
-Tell me a bit about yourself.
-You must demonstrate the ability to record both high quality video and in-game audio (not from a microphone).

What I’m offering:
-Sporadic paid contracted work. Either a flat per level fee or a CPM on the game’s video views.
-The chance to play games before they are released

Use the above email if you have any questions.

The original list is from February. A lot has changed since then. There are 17 new videos in the Top 100. The 100th video viewcount increased from 58k to 93k. Total views from the Top 100 has increased from 22 mil to 33 mil. But other things remain the same… Armor is well in first, with BubbleBox still solidly second. Joey Betz is still my top dev, but John Cooney and Eugene Karataev are gaining. And the % of views from the Top 100 has decreased from 81% to 76%.

Here is the data from Feb, side by side with the data from now:

Views are viewcount in thousands, Count is number of videos in the Top 100.

Didn’t get a chance to post about it yet, but I hit 500 videos last week with my 2nd half walkthrough of Pipol Smasher. Not too shabby, although I had 410 on Jan 6th, which means I’ve only uploaded 91 videos in the past 6 months. This makes sense though, since in early 2009 I was uploading walkthroughs to any game I could find. Now, I’m only uploading walkthroughs where I can monetize them.

Also had a 5th video hit 1 million views, and a 6th that should hit 1 million today (999,000 as of midnight).

Here is a breakdown of my videos by views, of July 09 vs July 10:

Are there any statistics/data that you guys would like me to show? I plan to do an update of Top Sponsors / Devs by views later this month.

Over the weekend, I had my 4th video hit 1 million views. This is the first video to hit 1+ mil that is not a fully self-contained walkthrough; instead, it is 50% of my Wake the Royalty walkthrough. The other half has 944k views and should hit 1 million sometime this summer.

Recently, the total viewcount on YouTube has been lagging. It seems to only update every few days. So I’ve been tracking my viewcount through TubeMogel instead, which is not QUITE as accurate on the short-term, but is fairly damn accurate long-term. All TubeMogel does is take a snapshot of the viewcount on each video at midnight, then sums them all together for your account total. This is dependent on YouTube updating the counts, which is why it’s often off in the short-term… but it evens out to be only a very small margin of error in the long-term. That explanation aside, My viewcount on TubeMogel as of Midnight this morning was 39,950,000… which means sometime today I hit 40 million total views. Yay!

My desktop is still in the shop, for exactly 1 week now. Going to call tomorrow to see what’s going on. Tass is starting to get the DTs from sexy computer withdraw. Sadly, I’m going to have to be without my desktop again in 2 weeks. The moving truck is taking all our stuff on June 22nd, and is not expected to arrive in Philly until June 29th. That means 1 more full week with the craptop. *sigh*.

Oh… and in other news. My big game project has basically been on hold the past week because of the desktop issue. Which sucks. Probably won’t hit FGL until July at this rate. However, I’m designing another quick satirical game with Benologist; but because of both of us being busy this month, that won’t see the light of day until July either.

I typed “Walkthrough” into my YouTube search bar and waded through the 1st 17 pages of results, which takes us down to 200,000 views per video.  ”Walkthrough” returned the results of any video with the word Walkthrough in either the title or description of the video.  This should be a pretty all-inclusive list, barring any games besides Ice Breaker that have a crapton of videos for 1 game (I just happened to know about the walks for those games, so I knew to check…  no one of the vids has 200k+ views).

The List: Game Name (# of Vids) – Total Views in Millions – Ave Views/Vid

1. Red Remover (2) – 11.4 – 5.7
2. This Is The Only Level – 2.8
3. Wake Up The Box – 2.6
4. Poptropica: Nabooti Island – 2.0
5. Cover Orange – 2.0
6. Use Boxmen – 1.8
7. Roly-Poly Eliminator – 1.6
8. This Is The Only Level TOO – 1.1
9. Poptropica: Big Nate Island – 1.0
10. Wake The Royalty (2) – 1.7 – 850k
11. Poptropica: Astro Knights (4) – 2.8 – 700k
12. Fragger (2) – 1.4 – 700k
13. Poptropica: Spy Island (3) – 1.9 – 633k
14. Demolition City 2 (3) – 1.9 – 633k
15. Poptropica: Counterfeit Island (4) – 2.2 – 550k
16. Poptropica: Mythology Island (4) – 2.0 – 500k
17. Demolition City (2) – 1.0 – 500k
18. Crush the Castle: Players Pack (4) – 1.3 – 325k
19. Stadium Sneakout (10) – 1.0 – 100k
20. Ice Breaker (40) – 1.8 – 45k
21. Ice Breaker: Red Clan (40) – 1.4 – 35k

These are video groups done by 1 person; no mix and matching.  Also, no 1 game/island had more than 1 person with 1 mil views on their walkthrough… although 1 or 2 of the Poptropica Islands were close with a 2nd.

Analyzing the list shows very specific types of games that meet this list: Poptropica, Phuzzles, and Puzzle Platformers account for 19/21.  CtC:PP is a physics game, but not a phuzzle… and Stadium Sneakout is a point & click that doesn’t really belong on the list at all because each video is :08-:30 long.  The top17 are 6 Poptropicas, 8 Phuzzles, and 3 Puzzle Platformers.  Finally, I made 8 of the top 18 (8 of 12 if you discount Poptropica).

If you know of any game that I missed, please let me know.  :)

Got this sexy screenshot last week:

Don’t know if anyone else finds it impressive, but I sure do. Also, thanks to these 3 vids, I got my first entry into the Top Monthly Channels, maxing out at 90th. Alas, the good things disappear so quickly; when those games were new, 200k+ views a day… now, under 80k.

This post stems out of my getting 10,000 subscribers while in NYC last week. It made me think about the relationship between total views and total subscribers, especially in comparing conversion rates from a year ago and now. It also just so happens that I’ve kept track of milestone dates of both views and subscribers, so I have some nice data points to work with. All information in this post will be based on a 1000:1 view to subscriber ratio.

Basic analysis: View and Subbie growth remained relatively similar through the 5000 mark, at which point Views started to completely dominate. I could go back into my spreadsheets and pull more data points of small areas between 5000 and 10,000… but that just seems like too much work.

The interesting question to all of this is why. I have a few theories, the combination of all likely forms the real reason.

-The 5000 mark is hit in roughly July-Aug 2009, which is around when I started to get a lot of in-game features. The in-game features increases views, but the views are not on YouTube, which almost certainly is the dominant factor as to why views increase dramatically from this point onward and subscribers lag way behind.
-There are only so many people interested in flash game walkthroughs. After those 5000+ people subscribed, it took much longer to get more because they just aren’t as interested in the content.
-Aug or Sept 09 is around when I stopped doing videos for random games, focusing only on games that I can monetize (the vast majority of which are in-game). This has resulted in less videos being released overall, so less exposure.

So what this tells me is that when the views are coming from YouTube, there is about a .1% conversion rate of view to subscriber… but when the views are from embeds on other sites, the conversion rate is closer to .02% (about 1 in 5000). This .02% is more from looking at data from the past month or two specifically, not from the difference in 10,000 values in the chart above.

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.