#the youtube algorithm goes so whack

[flybacktome]

today it's been Dime Store Adventures this one's on me

First it was Tor’s cabinet of curiosities

Now it’s Miles in Transit

Wheat dork will I fall into the binge hole for 😭

[codeandgin]

The Enshittification of TikTok

I’ve been using TikTok since around 2020. I could probably be classed as an average user; I don’t upload much, occasionally leave comments, and mostly just doomscroll. I enjoy the app; I have managed to train the algorithm as best as I can to provide me a feed of queer humour, world news, gaming content, etc. Short-form video can be a great space for that kind of content, and I love watching creative people carve out a niche for themselves. However, during my time using TikTok, I’ve noticed a wave of bizarre design decisions, alterations to the UI, changes to what kind of content is preferred by the algorithm, and I would like to vent about them here.

I would like to preface this with the statement that this article is in no way researched, more that it is an anecdotal account of aspects of TikTok that stand out to me as annoying and emblematic of enshittification.

I. UI

The UI of TikTok seems to be in an ever-changing state of flux. One day the homepage is split into “For You” and “Following”, the next day the TikTok Shop has joined them as a third tab. Then the “Friends” feed shifts to the navigation bar, only for it to be swapped out for the Shop a week later. Consistency is not key, it seems, in the minds of Douyin’s UX designers.

I understand optimising the layout. I understand the need to find places to put newly developed features. It just seems so constant on TikTok, that I almost doubt that they have a UX team at all. Given that it took years to add letterboxing so non-iPhone aspect ratios didn’t get random cutoff, I may be right.

II. Feature Added, Feature Removed

If you’ve been around on TikTok for any length of time, you’ll know how frustrating this is. With seemingly the same frequency of their UI changes, TikTok adds new features and removes well-liked features to the app. Who remembers pinned comments? I do. The repost feature that was recently added has already been gutted, as you can no longer attach comments to a repost. I don’t know if they’re unconfident in the features they make, or if they’re using us as unwitting beta testers, or what. To compound this frustration, rollout and removal of features seems almost random - dependant on the model of your device or even the region in which you reside. I didn’t get captions for nearly a year after they were first rolled out.

III. Impossible (4/4), conversations(2/4), are(3/4), coherent(1/4)

Comment threads are impossible to follow. It is impossible to have a coherent conversation with someone in the comments over a prolonged period because the comment threads don’t sort temporally. What’s the point in having the ability to reply to specific comments if the thread isn’t going to be displayed in the correct order? Sorting parent comments by an algorithm that boosts engagement, I understand. Sorting comments in a thread the same way is mind-boggling. The 100-character limit is already enough to kill nuance stone dead; we shouldn’t be forced to number a threaded comment so future readers can puzzle together the intended order.

IV. Filters, Content Scrapers, Commissions, and Ads

TikTok has some of the most bizarre content moderation on the planet, liberally applying the ban hammer on legitimate accounts for no apparent reason, and yet doing nothing about the prolific content scraper accounts. There are so many accounts that rip content from other TikTok users, from YouTube, from TV and Film, split it into a million 30-second slices, and farm engagement from it. Sometimes they go to the extra effort of pairing it with an unrelated video designed specifically to turn your brain off and keep watching. Sludge content is hell. And they see little to no pushback - from the comments, or seemingly from the copyright owners. And how could they? It’s like whack-a-mole, one goes down, and two more appear to take their place. And because these scraped videos are specifically designed to hold your attention, and leave you wanting more, the algorithm loves that shit, and pushes away genuine original creative material in favour of these rips. It’s horrifying.

Next to sludge content, with the goal of switching your brain off to farm engagement, are filters. Filter is a misnomer, in my opinion: low-budget augmented reality games would be a more accurate descriptor. With all the grace and robust programming of an interactive mobile game ad, most of these filters act as a medium to create low-effort videos, often to farm rage engagement through acting as incompetent as possible. Because people are so susceptible to rage engagement (why do you think mobile ads haven't changed in 10 years), the algorithm picks up on this and again, pushes this slop out.

Of course, TikTok is also a business and needs to make money. So of course that means, as time inexorably marches on, and they need to maintain the illusion of infinite growth, the algorithm is tweaked to push more ads, worse ads, and ads that are disguised as normal content. If you see “Commission Paid” under a video description, or a link to the TikTok shop, run, because that’s an ad. More ads between videos, and videos that are secretly ads, again diluting the wide range of actually creative art on the platform.

Block them, press the not interested button, close the app. Train TikTok not to reward this behaviour. Please.

V. Self-Censorship

[REDACTED]

Where Do We Go From Here?

Like I said, I love TikTok. It is a space that has connected communities around the world in a creative space. I learn more about current events on TikTok than I would ever learn on the ten o’clock news. I don’t want to see it continue to decline in quality, I want to see it grow.

This has been a space for me to vent, thank you for reading if you have.

Addendum

I didn’t redact V. Self Censorship for a cheap joke, by the way. I wrote about five different versions of that segment, but I couldn’t find a way to word how I feel about the topic in a way that felt adequate.

[jamsponge-blog]

Hello! This is a raw-text paste of the huge amount of thoughts I provided for the recent interview with The Guardian - it was written by Simon Parkin, who is superb - so I really recommend you go and read that first. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/youtube-stars-burnout-fun-bleak-stressed (This is all copy-pasted via my phone, and I haven't edited it as I would an article - it may be full of errors and it's definitely formatted quite badly. Ta!) *** I first properly got into YouTube after taking a job to head up a channel for a video game website, after working as a print journalist for a couple of years. Now I do my own thing and run a couple of channels, which collectively have just over 150,000 subscribers. It's pretty much a full-time job for me, and has been for just over 5 years. YouTube has been incredible in terms of creating opportunities - with low budget equipment and software I was able to create work that could easily reach thousands of people. Five or six years ago it felt very freeing - a system that allowed quality to naturally find audiences without having to go through gatekeepers. The sheer scale of the numbers you're looking at are the main thing - a handful of written pieces I've worked on have been read by more than a million people, but when videos go viral it's something quite different: one of my earliest, biggest hits was watched 5 million times in just a few days. I'm admittedly wary of that level of success now, and actively try to avoid "going viral" - but the brief explosion of mild internet fame I achieved in 2013 has allowed me some unbelievable freedoms: a small handful of that audience has kindly followed everything else I've done since, and I've managed to shift my YouTube career into something that feels sustainable - both financially and mentally. The channel I worked for blew up pretty quickly - after a handful of viral hits, I kept plugging at creating new regular content. YouTube is very strange in that it's not enough to simply create great things - most audiences expect consistency and frequency. If you're a channel looking to grow, this means both playing to the gallery of the followers you've got as well as pleasing the whims of "the algorithm". As a platform funded by advertising - of which Google take a healthy cut - YouTube's algorithms promote the videos that best suit the needs of those adverts. Because of that, real success on YouTube requires creators to jump through a series of constantly changing hoops: changing the upload frequency and duration of their videos to better align with the current criteria, in the hopes of seeing their work being fed more frequently to users who haven't seen their work before - or even, grimly, having their work being seen more frequently by those who already subscribe to their channels. I find the idea of chasing algorithms a frankly miserable starting point for creative work, however, so whilst I'm acutely aware of how to achieve success on YouTube the process that leads to it seems depressingly dull. There's a bleakly cybernetic tone to it all - sci-fi has mostly presumed that transhumanism would see technology being integrated into humans, but the zeal with which people aim to please algorithms suggests we're going to save a fortune on futuristic surgeries. What we're seeing a lot of these days is people using services like Patreon to get around the requirements of YouTube's algorithms, allowing people to make a living without having to achieve huge amounts of video views. Over the past few years it became a lot tougher for a lot of people to make a living from advertising on YouTube - mainly because the automated algorithms were whacking adverts on fairly inappropriate stuff - it was a Wild West situation, and every gold rush eventually ends. A lot of people have moved over to Twitch, where it's currently much easier to make a bunch of money - but the person costs involved are not insubstantial: there's a real difference between uploading videos and putting yourself out there, live, every day. I think if you're someone who really cares about putting on a good performance, these platforms end up being vampiric - always asking you for just a bit more until you've nothing left to give. For people who really care about their work, it's absolutely an unhealthy ecosystem. The sense that you should always be working is an absolute killer. YouTube very much has its own culture: people talk a lot about the community they have on *their* channel, but in truth YouTube itself *is* the community, and the tone and expectations of that wider community are far from ideal, to say the least. Knowing that working more could earn you more money is a standard freelancer anxiety, but with YouTube it's more the fear that if you take a break you might lose it all. Riding on the wave of success requires consistency, and with a fresh supply of wannabe stars toiling to find an audience on these platforms it's incredibly easy to slip off the radar - to lose favour with the algorithms that gave you your wings. I worry a lot about the health of many young people trying to find success on these platforms today - a nasty side-effect of algorithm-led content creation is that creators themselves are largely disposable: churn until you burn out, get replaced by three people doing the exact same thing. A crucial truth about internet culture that we've yet to fully appreciate, I think, is that human brains really aren't designed to be interacting with hundreds of people every day. When you've got thousands of people giving you direct feedback on your work, you really get the sense that something in your mind somewhere just snaps - we just aren't built to handle empathy and sympathy on scales of that level. Critical feedback is essential for growth - but it also takes time to properly absorb it. When you've got new strangers every day launching into a fresh intervention, your capacity for reflection goes right in the bin. "You aren't making enough videos". "You're wrong." "You used to be funnier." "You've let me down." These comments only represent a tiny fraction of your audience - most of whom will hopefully be positive and supportive - but the human brain is rubbish at numbers: you don't see ten negative bits of feedback as a fraction, you envision ten people you've really disappointed. When this becomes a regular occurrence - and you're already ploughing ahead making the next thing - you don't have the time or capacity to work towards any legitimate sense of closure, so you either get upset or angry and dismissive. A thing I've experienced that seems to be common is the way that your brain gets so used to these negative comments that it starts to automatically invent them while you're working - I suspect it's a kind of self-defence mechanism, helping you to catch potentially contentious aspects of your work, or things that might easily be misinterpreted. I definitely think this process does help with minimising negative feedback in the actual work, but if it means you're still living through the experience of that negativity - despite it being fictional - is that actually any better? One of the great things about supporting my work through Patreon is it allows me to work at a pace that actually provides room for reflection: I currently make one Cool Ghosts video once every two or three months: it's a broadcast-quality show that's deeply strange, and we take as long as we need to create it. It's the best work I've ever done, but I still feel the constant guilt that I'm not doing enough - I'm not working hard enough. Patreon allows people to work without the worry of getting enough views to make money from adverts, but unfortunately just creates a new strain of stress: You look at how much money you're earning every month, and worry that you aren't doing enough work to justify that figure. But the harder you work, the more that figure is likely to increase - so it's an impossible carrot-on-a-stick situation. Even when you're working as hard as you can, it's so easy to feel like you should be doing more. The first time I really experienced burnout was at the end of 2013. I'd taken a YouTube channel from 1,000 subscribers to 90,000 in just under a year, and my work had caught the attention of Charlie Brooker - leading to an incredible opportunity to work on a one-off show about video games. Trying to juggle that alongside my main YouTube job had me working 18-20 hour days for about 3 weeks, after which point I felt exhausted and frazzled in a way that weirdly seemed totally impervious to rest. Looking back now, I'd clearly been burning out for months prior to that: I looked pale, gaunt - my work had become increasingly rushed, increasingly acerbic in tone. Worryingly, this didn't affect my popularity - one of the most toxic things I've discovered about making content online is that the points at which you're breaking down, being slowly consumed by frustration, are the points at which the algorithms love you the most. "Divisive" content is the king of online media in 2018, and YouTube heavily boosts all content that causes people to get riled up. Explaining why you hate stuff gets you 10 times as much traffic as explaining why you love something - but it also means that the commentary you're dealing with is consistently angry. I don't think it's possible to exist in that space without the stress from that negativity bleeding back into your work: Anger is like a virus - it's fantastic for keeping audiences engaged, but it also motivates creators to better serve the algorithm: working and uploading in a rash, rapid fashion. It's why you see YouTube politically so dominated by right-wing creators - introspection, balance, empathy and care are all values diametrically opposed the platform's core values of More and Now. I think it's possible for creators to be maintained by that anger - nourished by the stuff - for months, years, possibly indefinitely. You see that so much on YouTube these days - people who've slipped into a deeply unhealthy place, keeping it together on a weekly basis by channelling that anger into exponential success. It's like one of those coins spinning around those circular charity things - escalating in a loop as they gently slide towards the void. Burnout happens at the point at which you pause, and I think that anger effectively allows people to maintain velocity for quite a long time. Over the past few years burnout has been more frequent and more serious - my wife was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 2014, and since then I've been mentally wobbly in a way which is frequently incompatible with living on the internet. Still though, I think I was burning out perfectly well without that - I spent my twenties working ceaselessly, feeling invincible and boundless. And honestly, I was. Right up until the point where I wasn't. I really worry about young people devoting their lives to platforms like YouTube and Twitch - because when you're young? You absolutely can. You've got the energy and focus to work incredibly long hours, you've got very few responsibilities to take your attention away from work, and - perhaps most importantly - you've likely still got a solid social circle, friendships that aren't difficult to maintain. The reality changes sharply when you get a bit older: your energy levels start to flake out, the stress you've put yourself under has started to damage you physically - my thyroid stopped working properly in 2016, and I've developed frequent patches of anxiety and depression. What starts out as being the most fun job imaginable - getting paid to sit and play videogames all day - can slide into something that feels deeply bleak and lonely: sitting alone for hours playing games and making videos is understandably aspirational when you're a teenager, but as an adult it's a cocktail for disastrous mental health. Suddenly in your thirties everyone gets busy - commitments make friendships harder, and the perception of success & having a "dream job" can slightly poison the way that friends treat you - leaving you understandably uneasy about complaining about your situation. It's this social aspect that leads to some of the biggest issues we're seeing with YouTube: if your life becomes so defined by the platform that you don't really have the time for a life outside of it, it's easy to double down on the relationship you have with your audience. This idea of being friends with your fans is inherently unbalanced, and a phenomenal source of power that many take advantage of with incredible cynicism. Perhaps worse than this, though, is the side-effect of creators having largely grown up being socialised within a constant feedback loop: the things you say and do on your channel define the behaviours of your community, but the behaviour of your community also defines your ideas of what is and isn't OK. It's unsurprising to see people who've spent most of their adult lives working on YouTube having automatically hoovered up some awful characteristics and worldviews from the platforms they exist on - it's a factory line that predictably churns out half-baked, bigoted variations of Peter Pan. I'm still trying to learn how to switch off, even now when I've fully escaped the churn. I think once you've immersed yourself fully into the Content-Creation mindset, it becomes pretty hardwired into your head. I'm mainly thankful though that I approached it as an adult - I think that without the wider perspective of previous work, I maybe wouldn't have realised how toxic it was. I think it's definitely possible to be successful without it taking over your life, providing you know what success looks like. If you're brilliant at what you do and you do something unusual, eventually you'll find an audience. If you stay true to what you love and remain honest with the people who love what you do, it's entirely possible to make a decent living without devoting your entire life to this stuff - if you care about your long-term happiness rather than just a short-term boost of cash, I honestly think it's the only real option. I've never had any formal relationship with YouTube itself, but I've never been impressed by the advice it gives creators. Emphasis is always firmly placed on growth - how to boost the size of your audience, how to get the most out of promotion, how best to "engage" with your community. I've always felt deeply uneasy about the way these things sit side by side: spend extra time making your fans feel loved - it's very an effective way of boosting your income. Patreon in many ways has only amplified that, with one popular company going so far as to label those who pay them monthly as their "best friends". It's incredibly cynical behaviour, but even when genuine it doesn't feel healthy - for many creators it seems from afar that their community has effectively become their main support network - that's an awful lot of eggs to put in one basket. We've seen cursory mental health advice popping up on the platform over the last year or so, but it feels far from sincere: encouraging creators to "take a break!" is pretty laughable when coming from the mouth of a system that actively promotes quantity over quality. There's no sense of responsibility for the culture that they've created - no good advice for dealing with the pitfalls that most people will have to deal with. Steady growth is great, for example, but what happens when growth explodes? When something goes viral? On paper that situation is 100% great, but in reality you're suddenly dealing with a vast, new audience - perhaps an audience that differs in tone to the one you're used to. What happens if the size of this new audience actively swamps the community you had before, leaving you suddenly creating videos for an audience you don't necessarily even like? Fame is the toxic by-product of success, and these platforms allow people to achieve fame quite suddenly - the realities of that are a double-edged sword. I think it's important that young people know it's OK to be unhappy whilst also a success: YouTube stars are always loved best when endlessly thankful for how lucky they are, but the harsh truth is that working on YouTube is just another form of job - you're allowed to decide that you actually don't like it, even if everyone you know keeps telling you that you've got the greatest job in the world. If you're not having a great time doing it, there's literally no point in doing it at all - don't let the demands of the audiences of algorithms steer your life into a position where it's no longer fun. It's important to be wary of rapid growth: if 50,000 people suddenly turn up on your YouTube channel, the obvious reaction is to be thankful and thrilled. If 50,000 people turned up outside your house? You'd probably hold off on opening the champagne until you'd worked out why. Finally, recognise that if you become mildly famous - your relationships with those around you will change. Don't let your desire for internet success get in the way of real-life relationships: the impossible-sounding truth about growing older is that it's remarkably easy to go from having loads of friends to realising you've actually only got 4. Being lonely and successful is a terrible combination, and one that seems to creep up on a lot of people without much warning.

[sandralmuller]

Using Facebook and Instagram like a superstar

One of the things I love about organising The Great Melbourne Blog-in is that I get to shape the event. At September’s blog in, I got to question Catherine and Cherie from The Digital Picnic about all things Facebook and Instagram during our Q&A panel. You know that glorious moment when you have all these questions simmering in the back of your mind and then suddenly you’re face-to-face with some very generous social media experts and you get to ask them all those questions? Yes, that moment. It was awesome!

Social media experts Catherine and Cherie from The Digital Picnic. Oh, and that’s me in the middle.

Pin it to read later

Running a Facebook page

Best tips for running an engaging Facebook page #Facebook #FacebookPage #SocialMediaStrategy Click To Tweet

As most people are aware (except those that make this critical error) one of the biggest mistakes Facebook page owners make is using it as a dumping ground for self-promotion. Using Facebook page only as an advertising platform is not what gains you engaged fans and followers. You need to draw back the curtain and put yourself out there. Show some of the back end of your business. Make your page about your audience and what they want.

As a copywriter, this makes sense to me – know your audience, what are their pain points, how can you address them, sell the benefits and not the features yadda yadda yadda.

Since the blog-in, I’ve created a schedule for my Silk Interiors Facebook page. This page supports my eCommerce site Silk Interiors, where I sell wallpaper online. My plan includes a mix of:

design quotes

inspo photos/eye candy

recycled blog posts

decorating and styling tips

videos

FB live

before and after home makeovers

celebrity style

discounts and sales happening in Australia

memes

questions

our wallpaper products.

My next step is to use the native Facebook scheduling app to schedule content to post each day for a full month. Doing it in one big batch will save a lot of time, even though it will take some time to curate and schedule the content, but I’ve made a BIG list of sources (I’ll blog about how I find them another day), which will be a great help. I’ll monitor the engagement metrics via Facebook’s ‘Insights‘ dashboard and see which post types perform well and I’ll experiment with different times of the day.

Whatever you plan, test, test, test and figure out what works best for your business.

If you have any plans, even a very vague and distant plan to use Facebook Ads, install the Facebook pixel into the header of any or all pages on your website you wish to track. This means setting up a Facebook business account and grabbing some code to paste into your website (very easy to do with a plugin if you’re using WordPress). The FB pixel is a sneaky little thing. It gives you the data to show your ads only to people who have visited your website in the past, for example. It helps you target people already interested in your business. You can also create ads to target users in the same demographic as your website visitors. Ooooh. Sneaky sneaky. And perhaps a bit creepy…

Have you installed the Facebook Pixel yet? #SocialMediaStrategy #FacebookPage Click To Tweet

Facebook. Knows. Everything… my business bestie and I were chatting on Facebook Messenger about awnings (totes random, I know) and then we both started seeing ads for awnings in our newsfeed. We hadn’t visited any awning or blind sites or visited awning pages. In fact, in our Messenger chat, we were coming up with the most random thing we could think of in that conversation. And then there were ads for awnings. Just saying.

What I learnt about Facebook Live videos

Pre-promote your Facebook Live session so you won’t chicken out. If you’re running a Facebook Live Q&A session, give people a chance to prepare their questions that you (hopefully) can answer. As a Facebook Live novice, I’m not sure what’s worse though – people turning up or people not turning up!

Pre-plan what you’re going to say. Always have something to talk about. Talk about something before you get into the guts of your video to give people a chance to join you, live. If they’re following you, they’ll get a notification to say that you’re live.

Avoid the wobbles and use a tripod for your Facebook Live videos #FacebookLive #FacebookTips Click To Tweet

It’s best to set-up your video on a tripod so your video is steady. A steady camera can also save you a lot of data – those micro wobbles when you hold your phone camera create a fatter video file. Not that I have to worry about data here in Korea, but a tripod will give your FB video a more professional look. I tend to swing my body from side to side while my head remains stable-ish when I do Facebook Live videos. I don’t know why. Perhaps that’s where my nerves manifest. Or I’m just a weirdo.

After you finish your Facebook live video, you can upload it and then change the video thumbnail. For laughs, Youtube and Facebook are in some kind of conspiracy to make sure they choose a thumbnail where you look your absolute worst.

See what I mean? Worst thumbnail choice ever! Excruciating for me… and the potential viewer. I look so bored with my own FB Live vid I’m falling asleep on myself.

But it’s easy to change it.

On the video post, click on those three dots on the top right… then click on ‘Edit post’.

Next, scroll through the available thumbnails and hopefully, there’s one that looks like you haven’t just eaten a sour lemon or are about to pass out. But if that fails, add your own custom image.

While you’re on that screen, you can add metadata to your post to help it get found more easily in Facebook’s search engine.

After you’ve uploaded your Facebook live video, go through the comments and respond to any questions people have. This will give your post a bit of a boost. The more comments (including your own) the more reach your video will get.

If you’re happy with the video, you could also consider using it in a Facebook Ad.

What I learnt about (non-live) videos on Facebook

If you’re going to add your video to Youtube, don’t share a link to the Youtube video with your Facebook audience. Instead, for better reach, upload the video directly to Facebook. Apparently, Facebook loves native video content. Of course, this makes sense. Facebook wants to retain as much ad revenue as possible. Keeping users ON Facebook and not sending them away to the Adsense share of the market is the sensible thing to do if you’re Facebook.

For greater reach, upload your video direct to Facebook, not via a Youtube link #FacebookTips Click To Tweet

Also, consider using a square format for your video as this is becoming really popular – people are used to and expecting the Instagram size and style of videos.

Don’t share everything between Instagram and Facebook or your audience, if they follow you on both platforms, will start to look like me in that thumbnail picture above. Yawn. I think it’s lazy social media-ing when businesses do that. Especially when you’re confronted with a face full of Insta hashtags on Facebook. I’m petty like that. Mix it up and share your video on Instagram a different day (or at least a different time of the day) then when you published your Facebook post.

I need to start a Facebook group and so do you

At a past TGMBI event, Linda Reed-Enever talked about building a Facebook Group to support your business or blog. I won’t rehash those bits, but it’s a timely reminder that if you share your Facebook page’s post to your Facebook group, it sends powerful signals to Facebook’s algorithms and can help increase the reach of your post even beyond the group.

I’m still considering what my FB Group will be about, how it fits with my brand and vision for my business and who I want in it besides my business besties. But first I need to schedule content, experiment and evaluate my Facebook plan.

Stay out of the naughty corner

Something else I learnt just this week is that Facebook has legislated yet another reason to put your page in the naughty corner – not disclosing sponsored or affiliate links. Facebook calls it ‘Branded Content’.

If you’re doing sponsored posts or publishing, as Facie puts it, content that features or is influenced by a business partner for an exchange of value, you need to tag the business partners in your branded content posts. But it’s not that simple. So you can do this, first you have to sign up for Branded Content within the Business Manager section of FB and be approved. If you’re publishing branded content (by Facebook’s definition) and not disclosing your relationship with the company, then you could find yourself in the FB naughty corner. This has happened to someone I know I know in a Facebook group just this week.

You can identify Branded Content posts because they have the small text ‘Paid’ whacked next to the time stamp of a post. This is different to posts you pay to boost where it says ‘Sponsored’. Other than that, I’m not sure what it all means, yet! You can read more about Facebook’s Branded Content tool and laws here.

What I learnt about Instagram

LinkTrees! AKA where had you been all my life/why didn’t I think of that.

Solve the 'link in bio' dilemma with a LinkTree @Linktree_ #instagramtips #linktree Click To Tweet

You know how you have to write something like Link in bio on your Instagram post and then update every single time you promote a new page or post or product? So annoying. Well, enter the Link Tree. You put one link in your bio that goes to a landing page where you include ALL your links. There’s even a website you can outsource your link management to – LinkTr.ee. (I wrote more about this tip in my recent post What to do after you publish a blog post.) You could also host a link tree page on your own website.

Instagram Stories – you need to be there and in the regular ole newsfeed. Your ‘story’ only lasts for 24 hours, but now that Instagram is no longer chronological, it’s your best bet for getting noticed at the top of someone’s Insta feed.

Look at your insights. What are the peak times and WHY are they the peak times? Look into the reasons why certain posts are popular than others.

If you haven’t already set yourself up with a business profile, it’s easy to switch from a personal to a business profile – here’s how. You’ll need a business profile to access your account’s insights.

Until recently, I’d only been using the image tools like Filters in Instagram on my pictures. Then I discovered an app called Fotor. The basic version is free. You can use the app or the desktop website to manipulate your images to make them look gorgeouser. I must admit, I’m a bit visually illiterate, but with Fotor, I’ve been having fun experimenting with image manipulation.

Get your images Instagram ready with the Fotor app @fotor_com #instagramtips #photoediting Click To Tweet

To illustrate my point, here the original photo I took.

And here’s the edited version. How much cooler and more interesting does this second image look?

Final words on social media-ing

Ultimately, when it comes to sharing content, be endearing to your audience. Maybe even a bit vulnerable. Be relatable. Suprise and delight your audience.

Thank you, Cat and Cherie, for sharing your time and knowledge.  If anyone wants to improve their social media skills, then you need to attend one of their online or in-person social media courses – and not just in Melbourne. These savvy social media experts travel!

Have you experimented with anything on social media lately? Any success or spectactular fails to share? Let me know in the comments below.

Using Facebook and Instagram like a superstar was originally published on Sandra Muller

[cryptochurp]

Alexander Shishow: “We’ll Make Sure Our Clips Fit Organically into the Site and Won’t Annoy People with Intrusive Advertising”

April 15 marks the end of the ICO of the Native Video Box project – a platform for promoting video clips based on modern deep machine learning and multi-tier blockchain technologies. Alexander Shishow, founder and CEO, tells us how to make money on video advertising without annoying the user, how NVB differs from YouTube and other traditional content hubs, and why video chosen to match the topic of the site rather than the specific user is now more effective.

Q: There are a huge number of projects on the video advertising market today, every one of which is trying to somehow be better than their competitors. Can you tell me in brief how you plan to conquer this market? What’s your platform all about?

A: Native Video Box is a service for situational video recommendations. We provide websites and mobile apps with a widget with several licensed videos, which are selected automatically to match the contents of the site, and which are perceived by users not as advertising but as the site’s own content. Our project also ensures the monetization of views of these clips thanks to the insertion of video ads in them.

Q: Can you give us an example of how this would work in practice?

A: Say someone has made a great video about how to bake a cake, or on travel, or on home renovations. Thanks to our platform, their content will automatically appear on sites related to the topic. In effect, we work as distributed media.

Q: How does the process of selecting clips for a specific site work, technically?

A: To start with, our block is installed on the site, which takes on the style of the website. Then our artificial intelligence algorithms go to work: they analyze the text content of the site, determine what its main topics and sub-topics are. Our platform then automatically selects clips from its own video content storage and offers them up when users view the page, first analyzing in a fraction of a second the user’s interests and the most popular queries.

Q: Why did you choose the video advertising market specifically? What is it that appealed to you?

A: I’ll just give you a few figures, and everything will be clear. Right now, video accounts for up to 80% of all Internet traffic. In 10 years the amount of video content on the Internet has grown by a factor of 42, and the capitalization of this market is more than $13 billion. Forecasts are this growth will continue.

Q: Those figures are impressive, sure, but there’s another side to the coin…

A: You mean competition?

Q: Exactly. A trend like that is bound to create serious competition that only the strongest and most high-tech companies can withstand. Is there a place here for startups like yours?

A: I have no doubt at all that there is. Why? Because we’re doing it in a way that our clips fit organically into the idea behind the site and don’t annoy people with intrusive advertising. Users will see ads only when they deliberately click on our videos. Thanks to our machine learning system and artificial intelligence, we select our videos to suit each specific site based on the site’s content, and not to suit the user. This is the main way we differ from traditional video hosting services.

Q: Is that a hint at YouTube?

A: Among others, yes.

Q: But YouTube is the largest video site on the planet, with a colossal audience. Anyone who wants to work with video goes there first. Isn’t that right? And if that’s the case, why does the market need you?

A: First of all, when placing video on Internet sites YouTube does not provide automatic selection of the right content for each site; you can only do that manually. Secondly, we allow both sites that are connected to us and content producers to make money, which ensures more monetization of content. YouTube and other sites like it are focused first and foremost on their own earnings.

Q: That’s all quite logical and understandable, but no one’s going to believe you if you say you’re working on the idea and not looking to earn money, are they?

A: Absolutely right, but we take a somewhat different approach.

Q: Which is?

A: We provide websites with high-quality, relevant video content, something they haven’t had before. Content like that makes a website more attractive to visitors, which extends the amount of time they spend on the site. Especially when they watch videos, users don’t go anywhere – our widgets are built into the site. In turn, the longer visit time on the site brings in an additional audience. In addition, the benefit to the site is that it pays nothing for the creation of high-quality video content, but at the same time, it earns money by having these videos on the site.

Q: Why is that?

A: By inserting hidden or not-so-hidden ads of another good or service in these videos. Everyone got used to product placement in television and in movies a long time ago. We do virtually the same thing, only on the Internet. In the end, all our clients come out ahead. They don’t get some lame ad whacking them across the head; instead, they get related materials on a completely different level. Plus, a greater number of views of the video, a bigger audience, and an acceptable price for services and high-quality click conversion.

Q: Your clients are completely different players in the video market: the websites that feature the videos, content producers, and advertisers. How do you distribute the profit from showing ads among them?

A: They are divided as 60% for the publisher, 25% platform fee and 15% goes to the content creator, respectively. All relations are governed using a smart contract.

Q: So, all the income from the advertising goes to your clients. In this case, how does your platform earn its money?

A: At the first stage, from the sale of video advertising using software platforms or RTB auctions (Real Time Bidding, an online advertising technology that works like an auction for advertising spots in real time – ed.). Later, we also plan to place native promo clips of various brands and to insert fragments in a sports video dedicated to the producers of sports equipment, in a video about travel – stories by travel bloggers about how to save on flights etc. In addition, with each showing of a video, we will receive a certain amount as a service fee.

Q: So how many sites have already signed on to your platform? What kind of figures are you planning on seeing in the near future?

A: In May 2018 about a thousand sites will be connected, which will provide about 120 million advertising views. Then in August sites in Europe and the UK will join us – that’s another 3,000 sites. In February 2019 there will be another 6,000 sites in Latin America. By 2019 we plan to hit 12,000 sites and 1 billion advertising views.

Q: And all these sites are ready to take your video right now?

A: Yes, they are.

Q: Can you explain what NVB needs blockchain for, and how you’ve integrated it into the project?

A: First of all, to work in a multi-currency environment and conduct internal settlements using tokens all over the world. This frees us from possible restrictions on financial transactions in various countries and cuts our transaction cost by a substantial amount – up to 30%.

Secondly, to reduce our financial and technical expenses. Thanks to blockchain the cost of settlements is dropping fast, and we don’t need to incur additional expenses on paperwork, which makes it possible to seriously cut our expenditures.

Thirdly, to put the cost of showing ads in writing, in smart contracts.

And, finally, blockchain gives our platform 100% transparency for the performance of various operations.

Q: How so?

A: For example, we are physically unable to unilaterally change the terms of distributing bonuses for video views. This means that the money of our advertisers, sites, and content owners will be completely secure.

Q: And this is written into smart contracts?

A: Yes. Our entire monetization system will be written into smart contracts, and the smart contracts, in turn, are available on GitHub (a major web service for hosting IT projects and their joint development – ed.). Their structure is open and transparent, and anyone who wants can take a look and see what’s written in them and how.

Q: Are you not planning to also write in the blockchain the number of times the video has been shown?

A: Yes, eventually we want to do so, in order to prevent once and for all any opportunities for fraud on the part of platform participants.

Q: What countries are you working with now, and what national markets are the project-oriented to in general?

A: First and foremost, we’re interested in the international English-speaking market – Europe, America, parts of Asia. Later, we plan to turn to countries that speak other European and Asian languages.

Q: How far along towards completion is your platform?

A: Its most important functions are all but fully implemented. Our site has six demo-versions of how it works with specific sites: there’s a preview of our projects on the Internet, demonstrating how video is shown using our widgets… In effect, it’s a full-fledged presentation of our work for potential clients.

Q: How long did it take you to create the NVB platform?

A: We began to develop the project in 2016, made the prototype, and in less than half a year it had already begun to earn its keep on the local market. We spent more than two years refining the platform – for example, over the past year we’ve worked to improve the machine learning algorithms, which are the core of the service.

Q: Your ICO finishes on April 15. Why do you need it? What do you plan to do with the money collected, and what are your current business objectives?

A: We have some very serious plans for the future. We need the money for marketing. We plan to develop the network itself, as well as technologies for targeting and delivering video and working with advertising. We’ll attract and promote new platforms with higher quality content, which are ready to host video clips. Our plans also include developing the network of video publishers and producers: we want to create a community for those who make video content. This will be our unique, distributed video hosting service. We’re also contributing to the development of algorithms for video selection and content recommendations, and to the development of technological infrastructure – in particular, a decentralized storage facility and multi-tier blockchain.

Q: How many people do you have on your team?

A: Right now, there’s a couple of dozen people working on the project.

Q: What kind of people are they?

A: They’re seasoned managers and specialists, with diverse, relevant experience in fintech and blockchain. For example, one of our team leaders is Andrey Smirnov, who has huge experience developing servers, external interfaces, and databases, and who also has knowledge of machine learning. Our business development manager, Paul Vasin, developed an advertising network and technology for Begun – the first contextual advertising service in Russia. Our senior developer Andrey Tsvetkov really knows his way around video advertising technologies VAST/VPAID, RTB open auctions, and advertising software like Weborama and Buzzoola. Dmitry Solodkiy is an expert in processing analytical data and is one of the pioneers of the blockchain, with an economics degree from the University of Bonn. Anton Noginov is a pro at constructing high-load systems, cryptographic algorithms, blockchain development, and the implementation of smart contracts. Peter Kozyakov and Alexander Vasilev are first-class specialists in fintech.

Q: You forgot to talk about yourself.

A: I’ve been working in ad tech for many years, and I’ve worked on projects using machine learning, including at companies like the Mirax Group and Creative Mob. I also launched the Botscanner project, an automated traffic quality control system.

Q: Who are your advisers?

A: We have several highly respected advisers: Gabriel Zanko, Andrew Playford, Mike Raitsyn, Julian Zegelman, and Yaacov Bitton. We are also being advised by Alexander Miheev, managing director of GOSU Data Lab and former CEO of MGID.

Q: You already mentioned that the video content market is extraordinarily promising and has a colossal growth potential. What place in this market is Native Video Box going to hold a few years from now? Are you making plans in this respect?

A: We plan on taking only a small part of it – a few percent, all in all. However, if you translate these percentages into money, that’s already hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.

Q: Could you be a bit more specific?

A: Our goal is to reach a turnover of $88 million in the first year, and to pay out up to $66 million to content owners and sites. We have deliberately decided not to put all our company’s income exclusively to paying out profits or to the growth of our own capitalization without any specific goals. The reason our project exists is to provide a convenient service to all interested parties and to direct income to its development and increase its ease of use.

  The post Alexander Shishow: “We’ll Make Sure Our Clips Fit Organically into the Site and Won’t Annoy People with Intrusive Advertising” appeared first on NewsBTC.

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