Growth Hacking YouTube For Views Funneling Into Clicks and Referrals
Note that this is a case study that paints a picture and then shows specific results. To emulate these results, you'd need to find your own niche and add new value to some other community - this is a very specific instance of a community I'm very familiar with, and already invested in.
>> Pique your interest about Brave, and $BAT? Download the browser here - and start earning on your own terms, with a more private and secure browsing experience! <<
YouTube is an playing field for alternative monetization techniques. Awhile ago, I started diving into the world of being a publisher on the Brave browser's $BAT Ecosystem. Being an avid fan of Karl Pilkington's radio shows, podcasts, and TV shows on YouTube, I wrote a brief note to some of his more prominent publishers there on YouTube:
I immediately thought to myself that I might capitalize on that:
And so - an idea was born. I'd take originally reposted content and repost that content back onto YouTube, after removing watermarks and creating a net-new piece of content to add value to the community of The Ricky Gervais Show followers, while planting a seed for my referral link for Brave. This would allow people to download the Brave browser and increment my Brave referrals (paying up to $7.50 if some geographies keep the browser installed 30 days), and people who kept viewing my new content with their new browser would also trickle down some of their new earnings they get by viewing ads in Brave back to me as I own part of their 'attention.' It is, after all, the Basic Attention Token.
Look - since the inception of this project, 35% of my attention has been focused on myself. Look, too, I renamed my YouTube channel from a boring and non-branded 'Jarett Dunn' to a TRGS quote - as most other publishers in this space have done with channel names like PilkBoys or Bald Manc.
Anyhow, I downloaded a YouTube video bulk download tool for Windows from GitHub. It allowed me to enter in a playlist and it would scrape the video file from each constituent member of that playlist. Afterwards, I used my extensive knowledge of the subject matter to retitle the episodes creatively so that my content sources might not be aware of the plot being executed. In this particular case, this isn't terrible nefarious as they'd all ripped the content from BBC and old English radio stations - they're all perpetrators of the same means and ends!
Opensource!
I then replaced the video track of the file with a static .png image I created in MS Paint.
I Googled until I combined a few different Windows batch (.bat) scripts to automate this process to loop through all of the files in the directory, and run the video manipulation program ffmpeg to edit the files. This outputs it in a codec and filetype that YouTube likes and contains the tags and metadata where it likes in order to process the files as quickly as little YouTube encoders can!
Here's what that code looks like:
@ECHO OFF
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for %%f in (.\*.mp4) do (
set /p val=<%%f
c:\users\jarettrsdunn\Downloads\yt\ffmpeg.exe -loop 1 -framerate 2 -i c:\users\jarettrsdunn\Pictures\lands.png -i "%%f" -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -tune stillimage -crf 18 -c:a copy -shortest -pix_fmt yuv420p "%%~nf For YOU!.mkv"
echo "fullname: %%f"
)
At one point, I found it prudent to cut 4m30s from the beginning of some of the video files - listening to the same intro countless thousands times myself, I thought I'd save my viewers from the same issue.
Here's what that other piece of code looks like:
@ECHO OFF
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for %%f in (.\*.mkv) do (
set /p val=<%%f
c:\users\jarettrsdunn\Downloads\yt\ffmpeg.exe -ss 270 -i "%%f" -c copy -y "%%~nf-!.mkv"
echo "fullname: %%f"
)
Next, we use YouTube's horrible uploading tool (albeit, when we can we can do 15 files at once instead of 1 by using the classic tool instead of the brand-spanking-new one), label the videos and give them a description. Here's where the magic comes in, here's a boilerplate description:
Read all my articles in the Head Like a {Messin’} Orange category all about Karl, Ricky and Steve here on my blog: https://jare.cloud/category/head-like...
!! https://brave.com/laz390 !!
Support this channel and many countless hundreds thousands others for FREE while also earning yourself for browsing with a safer, more privacy-protecting experience using Brave - paying YOU for viewing ads while also removing annoying, long and boring third-party ads across the web!
!! Download Brave now and earn $BAT! https://brave.com/laz390 !!
Now, for the juicy bits - 24 hours and 2 sets of ~100 uploads later, let's look at some stats!
I think the above charts speak for themselves!
Conversationally (and no, I haven't been uploading smut - I promise!) the three most viewed new videos in this experiment mention 'SEX,' 'boobs' and 'masturbation' - a sad commentary on the state of YouTube searches.
All in all, I've managed to create myself a new (evergreen, residual...) revenue stream - it might not seem like all that many views, but as I'm fighting for every email signup and cent of ad revenue on the blog, it's a good start in the right direction. What it really means more than anything is that anyone can achieve some very strange or unprecedented growth hacks by applying some ingenuity and a touch of automation to save on the sweat equity. This has bigger implications for people with loftier goals or - dare I suggest - a marketing budget.
ANNNNDDDD... Three days after the first YouTube post, we have our first successful Brave referral download! While it didn't yet convert to an install, it is in the highest yielding tier for geos (USA).
