Comment by thesethings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thesethings | Hacker News Reader

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Hadn't considered that. Can you expand a bit? I'm really into YouTube and would love to hear your theories.

I think it is a little harder to spam YouTube (with content) than the web. On the web, you can just parse feeds/spin text. On Youtube, you have to upload things. According to the presentation, they built out studios and are recording videos at a fast pace (and they do have thousands of videos on their channel, all with a signature white negative space backdrop). It is totally possible to make bad videos, not denying that. But it's a bit harder to trick systems into thinking there's something there that's not/misdirect.

Not saying there aren't other places in the system to abuse stuff (On YouTube you can friend spam, Fave-spam, etc), but it's hard to do with content.

Were you thinking content spam?

Instead of low-quality articles meant to get search traffic and AdSense revenue, these are low-quality videos meant to get search traffic and AdSense revenues. YouTube is the second largest search engine and also has a lot of space in Google SERPs.

It's also almost identical to Videojug, if you want to see how something like this plays out.

Our videos cost hundreds of dollars to make, are hosted by experts, shot in 1080p HD in a studio, have perfect audio and are on super clean white backgrounds (typically).

They are 10-50x better than most of the videos on YT in terms of quality and production value.

Most videos on YT don't have an expert and are shot on flipcams or iPhones with an open microphone, no lighting and background noise.

Our goal is to make HIGH-QUALITY videos that help people learn. If we do that we will be one of the top 25 sites in the US..... inside of three years.

You claim to be shooting for 500,000 videos in the next couple of years. There's no way that each cost hundreds of dollars (just $100 would make it $50M) and are all expertly made / edited.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/25/...

"The goal this year is to start creating (from scratch) 2,500 original videos per week in 4 studios at Mahalo's L.A. headquarters. And Calacanis says the goal over the next couple of years is to reach 500,000 original videos."

That's 625 "professional" videos per studio per week. Sorry Jason, I don't buy it.

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