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[Kolnukbyne]

I've started putting a few videos up on youtube of myself playing some games (Only have videos of Red Rogue at the moment, Link to the Past gameplay incoming...) as a bit of a hobby. It hasn't attracted much attention other than from friends I've shown it to, and while I really don't care about how many views or subscribers/whatever I get it would be nice to have people actually watch it.

So what would be a good way to promote myself? I've considered doing so on a group I am in on facebook that is run by the admins of a pretty large page, inwhich a couple of other people have done the same. I've considered maybe posting something on the Bay12 forums but... that sounds like it might be a little tryhard. I've considered asking another friend of mine who has a channel to maybe plug me but for starters that'd be incredibly rude, especially since his is a somewhat serious channel (having a partnership and all) and I can't imagine it'd be that simple to do.

Any ideas?

It's here (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOhCBjCIzmNVzCddVVP5uew) if you want to look at it. The current videos are kind of cruddy.

[Max White]

A lot of forums have a section to share these things. We have a "Play with your buddies" subforum for it. Go to a few forums you regularly visit and tell people what you have.

[Knight of Fools]

Are you monetized? If so, then I really don't recommend posting the Link to the Past videos. Nintendo recently went on an idiot spree and started claiming all videos containing games they've copyrighted as their own, monetizing it if it's not already monetized and taking away advertising income if you did monetize it.

There's also the risk of a company claiming copyright to your material, so do some research behind each game you do to make sure you don't get any strikes against your account. Sometimes you'll find stuff like this, which basically shows that a company is awesome. Be careful with sounds and music in most games, since sometimes those are actually owned by someone and looked for under Google's Content Protection Software. I've heard of problems over trap door sounds, of all things.


With that out of the way, the best way you can promote your videos is just being consistent. Make a schedule and post the videos. Honestly, I don't think folks would care if you made a thread over in Creative Projects about your channel in order to get feedback and get it started. I did that a while ago with my own channel, but I didn't follow up on making more videos. If you're curious, I've got a link in my signature, but I haven't done any videos for a few months and they were mostly things I did to test the waters. Once you're more established you can do what Max White suggests and post in the Play with Your Buddies section.


Once you've got a fair following behind you, you'll want to think about joining a partnership. I don't recommend Machinima, since they've kind of turned into Satan since they became popular, but there's a few other choices. Don't bother until you have about 10k+ subscribers and have a fair bit of consistency on your video schedule, though. No one will be interested until then. If partners are malls, the channels they host are stores. Stores that probably won't pull a profit or stick around for long won't get into the mall, even if that mall has no real size limit.

The big thing about being in a partnership is that it pretends to help protect you from copyright trolls and promotes your use of gaming video as Fair Use as you go on to more prominent games. None of them do a very good job of it unless you end up on the level of Total Biscuit or some such (And even then folks like Total Biscuit, commentator on one of the most popular gaming channels on YouTube, can have a problem with it), but it's better than nothing. Most importantly being a partner helps your videos get promoted by other creators within the same partnership.


So just keep trucking. From what I've seen your videos are pretty good. You've got a non-American accent, which is one of the more consistent signs of success in the YouTube market, so you've already got more going for you than I do. You may consider editing the videos down to only the interesting bits, but it's totally up to you. Generally when I do videos every hour of game play gives me about ten minutes of usable video, but there's so many ways to do it it doesn't really matter. Just do what you love you'll be successful. Unless what you love isn't loved by everyone else, but you know.

As for the friend who already has a channel, take advantage of that in the cleverest way possible: Do videos together. For example, play a game where part of the video is on his channel, and the other part is on yours. Like, play a multiplayer game of Tomb Raider with two matches, with one match on each channel. YouTubers working together is probably one of the best ways to increase viewership for both of them, because it means that if someone watching his channel likes you, or someone watching your channel likes him, you'll both win out. Just don't do the "yeah, check out my friends' channel for no reason other than I say so". Just, "This is my friend, here we are playing a game together, link to his own channel in the description in case you cared".

[Kolnukbyne]

Are you monetized? If so, then I really don't recommend posting the Link to the Past videos. Nintendo recently went on an idiot spree and started claiming all videos containing games they've copyrighted as their own, monetizing it if it's not already monetized and taking away advertising income if you did monetize it.

There's also the risk of a company claiming copyright to your material, so do some research behind each game you do to make sure you don't get any strikes against your account. Sometimes you'll find stuff like this, which basically shows that a company is awesome. Be careful with sounds and music in most games, since sometimes those are actually owned by someone and looked for under Google's Content Protection Software. I've heard of problems over trap door sounds, of all things.


With that out of the way, the best way you can promote your videos is just being consistent. Make a schedule and post the videos. Honestly, I don't think folks would care if you made a thread over in Creative Projects about your channel in order to get feedback and get it started. I did that a while ago with my own channel, but I didn't follow up on making more videos. If you're curious, I've got a link in my signature, but I haven't done any videos for a few months and they were mostly things I did to test the waters. Once you're more established you can do what Max White suggests and post in the Play with Your Buddies section.


Once you've got a fair following behind you, you'll want to think about joining a partnership. I don't recommend Machinima, since they've kind of turned into Satan since they became popular, but there's a few other choices. Don't bother until you have about 10k+ subscribers and have a fair bit of consistency on your video schedule, though. No one will be interested until then. If partners are malls, the channels they host are stores. Stores that probably won't pull a profit or stick around for long won't get into the mall, even if that mall has no real size limit.

The big thing about being in a partnership is that it pretends to help protect you from copyright trolls and promotes your use of gaming video as Fair Use as you go on to more prominent games. None of them do a very good job of it unless you end up on the level of Total Biscuit or some such (And even then folks like Total Biscuit, commentator on one of the most popular gaming channels on YouTube, can have a problem with it), but it's better than nothing. Most importantly being a partner helps your videos get promoted by other creators within the same partnership.


So just keep trucking. From what I've seen your videos are pretty good. You've got a non-American accent, which is one of the more consistent signs of success in the YouTube market, so you've already got more going for you than I do. You may consider editing the videos down to only the interesting bits, but it's totally up to you. Generally when I do videos every hour of game play gives me about ten minutes of usable video, but there's so many ways to do it it doesn't really matter. Just do what you love you'll be successful. Unless what you love isn't loved by everyone else, but you know.

As for the friend who already has a channel, take advantage of that in the cleverest way possible: Do videos together. For example, play a game where part of the video is on his channel, and the other part is on yours. Like, play a multiplayer game of Tomb Raider with two matches, with one match on each channel. YouTubers working together is probably one of the best ways to increase viewership for both of them, because it means that if someone watching his channel likes you, or someone watching your channel likes him, you'll both win out. Just don't do the "yeah, check out my friends' channel for no reason other than I say so". Just, "This is my friend, here we are playing a game together, link to his own channel in the description in case you cared".

A little bit more info than I wanted but thanks for all of it, it's useful to know these things.
Basically I plan to just keep it as a hobby and have no plans at all to try to monetize it unless I somehow garner way more attention than I'd intended. I just checked up a little bit on this Nintendo thing though and from what I've read it means that if I do decide to monetize then those videos will not bring in any monetization, and whether I choose to have ads or no Nintendo will be able to place ads on those videos. I can probably live with that. That said, I don't suppose you'd know if there's some kind of list that details which companies/developers do similar things? That would be very useful to me.

I've heard of the evils with Machinima, locking people in to working with them etc. but if I ever did want to join a network it'd likely be with RPM, which said friend and a friend of his are with.

As far as editting, I have been trying to figure out what works for me and I feel it really depends a lot on the game. I recorded about three hours of gameplay of Sid Meier's Pirates! (which I never went through with using because it was kind of crap) which I did edit the majority of out. It depends on the pace of the game. With my third Red Rogue video I did edit out about 8 minutes in total of it, but that was more because I got completely lost.

It is possible that I may be doing a few Awesomenauts videos with my friend as he has plans of doing a number of videos on it and plays with me often, I haven't yet asked him whether or not he'd be willing to collaborate though, definitely something I'll have to get on.

A lot of forums have a section to share these things. We have a "Play with your buddies" subforum for it. Go to a few forums you regularly visit and tell people what you have.

I'll definitely check this out, thank you.

Thanks for the info, guys!

[Knight of Fools]

That said, I don't suppose you'd know if there's some kind of list that details which companies/developers do similar things? That would be very useful to me.

Usually it's best to go on a developer by developer basis, but here's a couple of lists I've found. The first one I think is done by someone here on the forum, the second one has a list of stuff under the video. Either could be out of date, but it's a good start if you're looking to promote companies that are cool about that sort of thing.

[Bouchart]

Have you considered randomly spamming people?

[Kolnukbyne]

That said, I don't suppose you'd know if there's some kind of list that details which companies/developers do similar things? That would be very useful to me.

Usually it's best to go on a developer by developer basis, but here's a couple of lists I've found. The first one I think is done by someone here on the forum, the second one has a list of stuff under the video. Either could be out of date, but it's a good start if you're looking to promote companies that are cool about that sort of thing.

Thanks! they're a nice starting point, at least.

Have you considered randomly spamming people?

Last time I told someone to watch something they yelled and kicked at my shins.

[mastahcheese]

Have you considered randomly spamming people?

I read this in Wally's voice from the Dilbert show because of your avatar, and it made me laugh.

[MorleyDev]

For monetization help, I'll do a little "self-promotion" here and say that I idly maintain two public Google Spreadsheets (the one Knight of Fools linked to is mine):
A list of Companies that allow blanket monetization of all games
A list of Individual Games that allow monetization (but couldn't find blanket company permission).

The difference between my list and the other one is I'm a bit stricter: I only list things with a link and a quote from the dev or publisher. No publicly available link, I won't list it. Private e-mails are therefore a no-go and I don't contact publishers or developers to ask because even if they say it's okay, without a public link there isn't a reliable enough paper trail for other people to follow.

I was considering turning these into a more formal project at one point, like a proper website and API and stuff, but never got around to it (it's still in my "ideas" pile though). They are by no means a complete list, but they all come with sources which is useful and are situations where there is no ambiguity regarding monetisation which is nice.

And if anybody knows of any missing, I have a form to tell me so I can update the list, and a form to report out-of-date information.

But yeah, for promotion: Share on forums and reddit in appropriate sections is always a good place to start. To quote Jesse Cox: "Advertise like shameless whores".

[Max White]

The other thing you can do is once you have a few videos up, getting a bit of your own style going, getting a few subscribers, try to cross promote with other channels. Find people that play similar games to you and offer to join them for a few multiplayer videos, or succession games. Ride those coattails.