Today in Digital Marketing - Why Does This 20-Second YouTube Video Have 200M Views?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, batting down the hatches, a new Google update is rolling out.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Snapchat has some new toys for media buyers. Facebook totally isn't doing anything shady with its new security feature, guys. YouTube community building may get easier and a big Instagram frustration has been fixed. It's Wednesday, November 17th, 2021. Happy National Unfriend Day, United States. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. And here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 506. Today's episode is brought to you by CMOX.

Starting point is 00:01:33 See if you have what it takes to be a high-paid, in-demand, fractional chief marketing officer. Go to becomecmo.com. And parents, there is one bad word in the YouTube story at the end of today's episode. All right, let's get started. Supply chain problems, shipping delays. What else could possibly go wrong for businesses this holiday season? How about a change to Google's algorithm? Just two weeks before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the biggest online shopping season.

Starting point is 00:02:02 Yes, Google has announced it's rolling out a new core update starting today. Core updates are usually pretty big. They only do them two or three times a year. No word on specifically what they're changing here. Google says it typically takes about one to two weeks to fully roll out. So how do you know if the update lowers your ranking? There's a pretty solid Search Central blog post, although it is from 2019, but still valid today, where Google outlines how you can track this and also recommends you give your website a self-assessment with a list of quality and content questions linked to that post in the premium newsletter. Some platforms like Moz and SEMrush can also help.

Starting point is 00:02:39 May the update be in your favor. Snap, the company behind the Snapchat app, is introducing a streamlined multiple formats delivery option for placing ads. This will allow marketers to purchase all of Snap's video formats in one ad set. Multi-format delivery covers collection ads, commercials, Snap ads, and story ads. And Snap's augmented reality camera offerings will be added by the Q2 of 2022. Snapchat advertisers will soon see a multiple formats ad set option within Snap Ads Manager and then can bundle different creative options for placement. Multi-format is being launched this week. A couple of weeks ago, Meta, you know, Facebook,

Starting point is 00:03:34 announced it would be deleting the one billion facial recognition templates it has of its users because something something we're a good company now. And for a brief moment, maybe people believed they'd turned a corner and decided to do the right thing. It was, though, a brief moment. Instagram is now asking some users to give them, wait for it, images of their faces. This time, it's not that pesky lo-fi image template. No, now they want a full video that shows your face from multiple angles. To be fair, this is all part of an apparent security update to verify users' identities, according to screenshots posted to Twitter by Matt Navarro.

Starting point is 00:04:10 Instagram then followed up with a tweet saying it's asking suspicious accounts to prove there's a person behind an account and not a bot. One user's screenshot shows Instagram's instructions to slowly turn your head to get all angles of your face. Instagram says that the video selfie feature will not actually use facial recognition, technically speaking, and that the video will be deleted after 30 days. While the promise not to store any data may reassure some users,

Starting point is 00:04:37 it may be hard to sell those who are already wary of Meta's privacy policies. Heads up, social media people, YouTube is testing new features to give you more channel management options. By the way, parents, this is not the YouTube story I was talking about earlier. This one's safe. The new features are within YouTube Studio and Brand Connect and are designed to provide more functionality for managing channel engagement, as well as more options to help content creators secure branded content deals and monetize their work. Here's a look into the new features, some of which are just being tried out, by the way. First, the channel guidelines filtering tool is being expanded to more creators. This feature allows creators to define up to three channel

Starting point is 00:05:19 guidelines for video comments. Users have to read and accept these guidelines before they make a comment, and they're a good guide as to what conversations you want to see on your own channel. This feature will not cause comments to be hidden or removed. YouTube notes it is an experiment that is only available to iOS and Android users and may only be available for a short period of time. Second, improving tools for partnerships

Starting point is 00:05:41 with brands and creators. An updated paid product placement checkbox and new media kit audience tools. Creators in this experiment will see the existing video contains paid promotion checkbox become required in the upload flow to indicate if their content includes a brand deal. They're also testing a new audience summary within the YouTube brand connect interface that makes it easier for creators to pitch themselves for brand deals using a tailored media kit. And a new feature within the takedown web form that will allow you to automatically prevent copies of content that you have removed from being uploaded. YouTube has also expanded access to its copyright match tool for creators.

Starting point is 00:06:32 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. His name is Joed Karim. He's standing outside an elephant exhibit in a zoo. All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long thumbs. It's a short video, not even 20 seconds. And how do I say this gently?

Starting point is 00:07:14 It's not very interesting. It's blurry. Karim himself seems a little bored by it all too. And that's pretty much all there is to say. But this video has more than 200 million views on YouTube. Why? Because it's the first video ever uploaded to the platform. Kareem was a co-founder of the fledgling site back when he posted it 16 years ago.

Starting point is 00:07:37 And this week, that video got turned into something of a protest. Kareem, apparently mad at the decision to remove public dislike counts from YouTube videos, changed the video's description to a bit of a rant on the topic. Quoting him, When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube. Why would YouTube make this universally dislike change? There is a reason, but it's not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed. Instead, there will be references to various studies,

Starting point is 00:08:11 studies that apparently contradict the common sense of every YouTuber. The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can't be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that's okay. The idea was never that all content is good.

Starting point is 00:08:34 The idea was, however, that among the flood of content, there are great creations waiting to be exposed. And for that to happen, the stuff that's not great has to fall by the side as quickly as possible. The process works, and there's a name for it. The wisdom of crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then the platform invariably declines.

Starting point is 00:08:56 Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre? Because nothing can be great if nothing is bad. In business, there's only one more thing important than make it better, and that's don't fuck it up. And finally, something many social media managers have been waiting for, Instagram now lets you delete one photo out of a carousel. If you don't like an image or video in a carousel, now, finally, you can click edit, scroll to the image, and click delete in the top left corner, as Borat would say.

Starting point is 00:09:34 Wow, wow, wow, that's very nice. I'm breaking. So I don't know if you follow Canadian news at all, but, you know, despite everything going on, including the supply chain issues, we here on the west coast of Canada have an even bigger problem when it comes to supply chain, and that is that the city of Vancouver and surrounding municipalities are basically cut off now from the rest of the country. And that is because of massive,

Starting point is 00:10:00 massive flooding that took out some major highways and railways, by the way, because they ran alongside the highway. So, yeah, supply chain issues times three. So, you know, be grateful you've at least got roads where you are. Talk to you tomorrow. Attention, agency owners and marketing consultants. The new iOS updates aren't the only thing changing in today's marketing landscape. The role of the marketer is getting disrupted by high quality talent across the globe,

Starting point is 00:10:34 forcing your prices to decrease. If you've seen your marketing rates stagnate or decrease in the last two years, you need to do something new. Here's the truth. When you work, you can focus on solving small problems. As a result, you deserve small rewards. But if you could instead focus on solving bigger problems in those same hours, your income increases with your impact. Hey, I'm Casey Stanton, and I train marketing consultants and agency owners to become fractional chief marketing officers so they can ascend to the top role in a company, find new work for their agencies, and push their clients to record revenue and growth. Our fractional CMOs are paid to do the fun stuff, marketing strategy.

Starting point is 00:11:10 If you want a full pipeline of great prospects with a simple and clear way to sell and service them as a fractional chief marketing officer, go to becomecmo.com. If you have more than three years of marketing experience, see if you have what it takes to be a successful fractional CMO at become CMO.com.

Today in Digital Marketing - Why Does This 20-Second YouTube Video Have 200M Views?

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