I wrote a short story for a client, and it turned out really good. Then, after all was said and done, my client mentioned he stole the idea from the Internet.
If all you need to do is right-click on something, why be original? Creativity isn’t rewarded, it’s just copied. People who want to copy something because they like it, but don’t realize there’s a value there.
There’s an assumption that if it’s online, it should be free. If this was the case, no one would be making any money off their creations and you’d see much less of it online.
Anything can be ripped off. That’s why it’s even more important to be 100 percent original. Don’t fall into the easy trap of generating content mashed up from other people’s ideas. You won’t stand out. You’ll be exactly like everyone else who is doing it.
We don’t revere people like Steve Jobs because he copied other people. He got the respect he did because he created something new.
When anything can be copied off the internet the only thing I have is originality. People want original content, not the same old thing. That’s why, for instance, Charlie Sheen jokes got old very quickly.
My writing might not be much, but at least it’s my own.
Here’s my YouTube channel. You’ll find some very funny and some very wrong short films here:
I’m not proud. In fact, it helps to own up to your stupidity outright. Let me give you an example. I was sitting in a car, when a friend came up to the side to ask me a question. I stuck my head out and bonked it right on the window.
“Did you just hit your head on the window?” he said, laughing.
“Yeah.”
He laughed some more, and that was the end of it. If I had denied it, he’d still be busting on me to this day.
So, to that end, here are three things most people wouldn’t admit:
3. Stuck between a fork and a hard place
You know when a drawer won’t close because a utensil gets wedged in there real good? The handle is stuck on the bottom somewhere and the top gets propped up against the underside of the cabinet?
Well, imagine instead that it was a fork getting crammed between the utensil holder and my middle finger.
I was pulling out a spoon for my daughter to stir her chocolate milk. She was talking and I was paying more attention to her than what I was doing. I pushed the drawer closed with my hip as my hand was over the forks.
Here’s a nice little video that shows the damage:
2. The builders are coming!
Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, there were always houses being built. They were a beacon to neighborhood kids. We climbed all over them, imagining what the rooms would be like, what the people would be like.
When I was in third grade I was venturing into one such house. And then I heard “The builders are coming!” My exploration partner sighted the worker van coming down the street. I leaped off the first floor.
But it was built on an incline. In the back of the house, the first floor was about five feet off the ground. At least, that’s what I guess it was now, looking back. It could have been three.
I remember just lying on my back on a slab of wood. I didn’t move and I felt like I couldn’t and I didn’t know why. Then my friend grabbed my hand and pulled me up. My neck hurt instantly. We ran. It turned out it wasn’t the builders, just a similar-looking van.
For the rest of the week, I couldn’t move my neck without pain. My teacher told me to keep moving my neck little by little until it felt better. It did, eventually. My parents said I never complained and they never knew. I was a quiet kid, but I still can’t figure out how this got missed. Anyway, it was probably whiplash, the reason I have scoliosis and regular headaches to this day.
1. The Kazoo
I used to keep a kazoo in my car at all times. It’s a good idea. You never know when you’re going to need a kazoo.
My car had a perfect place for it – a small cutout to the left of the steering wheel. In a more expensive model, some wonderful feature was probably supposed to go there – like a chocolate dispenser or a flux capacitor. As I got the bottom line model, it was just a hole. The older man who sold it to me told me twice “You can put your McDonald’s hamburgers in there.” Instead, I kept a kazoo there, with almost half of it sticking out.
It had rained while I was at work, and there was a big puddle by the driver’s side door. I reached over the puddle and opened the door. I judged the distance and guessed I could jump over the puddle into my car.
Somehow my legs went wild and my knee scraped against the kazoo. The cheap plastic mouthpiece scraped the first few layers of skin off my knee.
At first, I was too shocked to know what happened. Then, the blood seeped up from the wound. It ran down my leg and soaked my sock on the ride home.
Again, I tell people these things because it’s not good to hide stupid things you’ve done. You should share them and let everyone in on the joke.
Besides, I already told one person and he tells everyone so there’s no keeping it a secret!
Snake sounds like an evil version of the guy who narrates movie trailers. “In a world…where things are not as they seem…” He has this menacing tone to him that makes it sound like if he was narrating a movie, he’d want all the characters to die.
Snake also really, really enjoys what he does. There’s a subtle element of glee when he’s threatening someone.
I imitated Snake for an animated movie:
In order to do the voice, I watched a bunch of clips of the voice actor, David Hayter, mostly spoofing himself. Hope you enjoy!
I’ve been fortunate enough to start making money off of my YouTube videos. Small ads pop up on the bottom from Google AdSense. Mind you, it’s very little money. I’m up to $3.41. (Edit: There’s some potential for much more-check out Entire Channel at the bottom) The reason for this is that my videos shoot up in popularity, then drop into obscurity. It’ll get a few hundred or a few thousand views in one day and then nothing the next.
This is the chronology of events that takes place over the course of a few days:
The video gets popular (a few hundred to a few thousand views)
YouTube sends an e-mail asking if I want to sell ads
I apply for the program
Ads go up
I wanted to share how this happens, and hopefully help people make some money from their videos.
First, here’s a video detailing how to make a video suitable for ads, and then how to publicize it.
How to promote
I have a word file where I write the name of the video, the date it’s uploaded, it’s address and embed code.
Then, there’s a chart with all the different places I tend to send them: Stumbleupon, Tosh, etc. I don’t send every video to every place. There are some sites, like www.iheartchaos.com, that are monitored by human beings and they probably won’t appreciate me spam submitting things every week. There are some videos that work on their site, and some that don’t. I only submit the ones that do. When it comes to someplace like Reddit or Digg, no human has to approve it going up. It just goes up. So I send everything to these places.
Here’s some videos of mine that have started to make money, and how it happened (Some of them have really inappropriate humor):
Smooth Randy and The Socky Show
Smooth Randy and The Socky Show: This was my first video that I started making money off of. It was uploaded 3/4/11. It got 2,700 views in one day! Most of them were from Reddit. 2,700 views is a drop in the bucket in YouTube terms, but still, it got the ball rolling on making money back.
Later in the week, I got an offer from YouTube to start selling ads on it. But by this time, it was already too late. Nobody was watching the video anymore, so no one was watching the ads anymore.
I wound up making 19 cents on Smooth Randy. This post was almost called “How to make 19 cents off YouTube,” but then I got a few other small successes:
Really Big Hole
Really Big Hole was uploaded 6/20/11. It got an invite June 23 after 2,200 views. It received 1,700 views from IheartChaos.com on June 21. About 500 more views on June 22.
I’m not sure when it got the invite. Maybe it was just after the first day’s views of 1,700 on June 21.Who knows?
Parenting: Making Sacrifices
Parenting: Making Sacrifices got an invite at midnight on June 24, after 487 views, 250 of them on June 21, and 150 on June 22. Of these, 420 came from www.buzzfed.com
This is pretty strange because I uploaded it 12/2/10. So this was a case where someone else came upon it – probably from watching Really Big Hole – posted it to buzzfed and it just took off.
A Good Transformer Movie Should Be Easy
A Good Transformer Movie Should Be Easy. This one is safe for work and not offensive. I was very excited that this got chosen so quickly. I put a lot of time and effort into the Transformers movies. The first one is almost up to 10,000 views right now, but it never got invited in. This one did, though. This leads me to believe that after a little bit of success in advertising on other videos, you get invited quicker.
It was uploaded on 7/7/11. I got the e-mail 7/9/11 after 275 views. The views came from all over (because I promoted it all over), but the largest referrer was www.tfw2005.com.
Another video of mine received 270 views in one day a few months earlier, but it was not enough for YouTube to consider ads. So, back then, I figured the magic number must be somewhere between those two. Until the above Transformer movie got an invite after 275. So, either there really is no rhyme or reason or the invites flow more freely if you’ve already got ads on other videos.
Parenting: Testing Boundaries
Parenting: Testing Boundaries. This one was really strange. This video was uploaded June 5, 2011. It got 6,000 views on June 22. It was invited into the AdSense system on 7/10/11. (5,000 views were from I-am-bored, and 1,200 views were from buzzfed.com. I remember logging into my YouTube page and seeing 6,000 views suddenly there and thinking there must have been a mistake.)
I got a big boost on several videos on June 22 and 23. Back then I counted 10 total videos that could get invited into the adsense program. And I waited impatiently for the invites. This is the only straggler. So, maybe they just take a while. I don’t know.
I posted a question to YouTube’s forum about what process YouTube uses to decide what gets invited and what doesn’t. The responses were that there didn’t seem to be any real rules. It just happens.
Elmo Demands Executive Producer Credit On Sesame Street
By way of comparison, this video, “Elmo Demands Executive Producer Credit,” received 900 views in one day after Katy Perry was cut from Sesame Street, (and later the Grover Old Spice ad parody aired), and I was sent an offer from YouTube for advertising. However, this was made before I really understood the copyright rules, so I can’t have ads on it.
Entire Channel
Seemingly out of nowhere, the entire channel gets the invite for ads July 27, 2011. This was after 60,000 lifetime views, about 150 a day for two weeks. And about a month after that big hit where I got 20,000 views at the end of June.
Now, I was able to go through every video I had and enter it into the monetization program to get ads.
Even more importantly, I can enable ads the second I upload a video. Therefore, if the video takes off, there will already be ads on it.
Partner Program
YouTube has a partner program that allows for far more money to be made. I don’t qualify for this yet.
Firstly, all your videos have to have no copyright problems. About 8 or so of mine are still made of pictures I didn’t take. I’m working on reshooting these, though.
Secondly, every video has to have thousands of views. I’m nowhere near that yet.
Hopefully, this helps you make some money off your videos. Let me know if it works.
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