A video on my YouTube channel recently passed half a million views, in just over a year since I put it up. By viral video standards, that’s not going to make any top ten lists, but it is impressive for a few reasons.
The first reason is the video in question is unoriginal. In fact, it’s a copy of a widely available video that was shown on the news hundreds of times back in 2002 and 2003. Because it was a news event, there are many, many copies of this video all over YouTube, and copies of it exist on just about every other major video site.
The second reason is my YouTube channel (of which I bet many of you weren’t aware) has very few subscribers and only a few thousand views of other videos. So it had no built-in audience to create those views.
The third reason it’s interesting (and no doubt the source of many of the views) is my copy of this video is the now the number one hit on Google for many relevant searches. In just a year I managed to usurp all those other copies in several search engines.
So what was the video? And how did I do it? The secret is metadata. Read on.
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