Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve worked with a non-profit organization before, then you undoubtedly know what a funding goal thermometer is. It’s essentially a giant thermometer drawn onto a poster board and colored in with red marker whenever a non-profit gets a donation. Today, YouTube added something similar to that to some of its videos.

Through the site’s Non-profit Program, YouTube has added a new feature called Campaigns, which allows non-profits to create campaigns in order to achieve goals like increasing views or subscribers. With this new feature, they can track their progress with a new completion bar that shows how many views a video has gotten — similar to a giant thermometer.

Multiple videos can be added to a single campaign, and these videos will feature an overlay that shows the completion bar, as well as a custom message that encourages viewers to share the video, or even donate and contribute time or money for whatever campaign a non-profit might be running. The completion bar will also be displayed in the non-profit’s YouTube channel.

YouTube says they have more than 18,000 non-profit organizations in their Non-profit Program and that the site is “always looking for ways to help nonprofits turn video views into greater awareness, petitions signed, laws changed, dollars raised, and lives saved.” Since a lot of users hate any kind of pop-ups or annotations on YouTube videos, hopefully the non-profit overlay will at least get a little bit of respect.

YouTube launches Campaigns, a “digital thermometer” for non-profits is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Felix Baumgartner might not have broken Joe Kittinger’s world record for the longest time spent in freefall, but he did smash a fourth milestone during his dive. In addition to records for the highest ever jump, longest distance fall and fastest downward speed, the stunt was watched by eight million YouTubers at the same time. While the site hasn’t divulged exact stats, that figure is apparently higher than those who watched President Obama’s inauguration. That said, if you weren’t one of the eight million, you can head on past the break to watch the highlights reel — unless you’re already bored of watching a man fall, unaided, you know, from space.

Continue reading Felix Baumgarter breaks YouTube record as 8 million viewers watch his space jump (video)

Filed under: Misc, Transportation, Internet

Felix Baumgarter breaks YouTube record as 8 million viewers watch his space jump (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The days of using thumbnails of scantily-clad and well-endowed women to drive clicks to your YouTube videos – thereby placing them higher in the search results – are over. Today, YouTube announced that it’s changing what it bases its search rankings on. Instead of determining search placement by looking at the number of clicks a video has received, YouTube will instead be basing its search results on the time spent viewing the video.

In other words, if the vast majority of users watch your video all the way through, it will do better in the search rankings. If a lot of viewers stop watching your video after the first few seconds, your video’s search engine results with suffer. Naturally, this works two ways: it gives those who produce good content more exposure, while it keeps people on the site longer.

Keeping people on the site longer means more advertising revenue for YouTube, so it’s a win-win situation, so long as you’re among the content creators who are putting out engaging videos. YouTube has even added a “Time Watched” report to analytics pages, so you can see which of your videos keep people watching and which ones are making people look elsewhere. YouTube says on the Creators Blog that it has “started” to adjust search engine results in this way, so it sounds like this feature will see a gradual roll out over the coming days.

This sounds like a great idea to us, but it makes us wonder if creators will start making shorter videos so a larger number of viewers make it to the end. Would something like that even work? There are a lot of questions surrounding this change that still need to be answered, and you can bet that concerned content creators will be asking all of them in the next few days. What do you think of this new way of ranking videos in YouTube search results?

YouTube search rankings no longer based on clicks is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google pulls in nearly $2 billion a year in YouTube advertising revenue, but that’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the $60 billion earned by broadcast networks. To rely less on viral cat videos or “Gangnam Style” breakouts, the company has announced that it’s advanced funds to content producers like Jamie Oliver and Michael Cera to create 60 new original channels in France, the UK, Germany and the US. That’s in addition to the 100 channels it already created last year, and Mountain View also said it would take that original launch up a notch in 2013 by providing even more funds to the most successful efforts by artists like Jay Z and Amy Poehler. The company didn’t say exactly how much cash would be raining down to all those channels stateside or abroad, but considering the amount it recently spent just marketing them, you may want to pull the trigger on that new cinema camera, after all.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD

YouTube advances cash for 60 more original channels in Europe and the US originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Oct 2012 01:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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YouTube’s ContentID was a huge step forward towards online video being copyright-compliant, but the system had some quirks. For instance, official NASA recordings of the Mars landing last month were removed due to a complaint from a news network. Michelle Obama made a speech at the DNC that was flagged, even though YouTube was the official streaming partner of the Democratic National Convention. That’s not even mentioning the countless smaller media creators who have had legitimate videos flagged. Under current ContentID policy there is little to no recourse. That’s about to change, because Google-owned YouTube announced that they were tweaking the system to cut down on the number of false positives and system-wide abuse. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: YouTube takes copyright violators to school, Jailbreak of Xbox Still Deemed Illegal by Judge,