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Video at UBC and how to run a YouTube channel without videos
Posted by: Jens | January 3, 2012 | Leave a Comment
When I started at UBC at the end of 2008, I was surprised about the absence of really good videos about UBC. But as it turned out, that assessment wasn’t correct at all. The more people I met and the more I learned about the organization, the more obvious it became that we had some good videos, but we (as in all of us at UBC) did just not publish them very well. Some videos only existed on DVDs and were played at fairs and other videos were hosted on a local webserver and streamed only on a single website that made it hard to find it – if you did not happen to specifically search all UBC sites for videos. We essentially missed out on a lot of traffic that sites like YouTube offered.
Shortly after, in March 2009, I discovered a couple of videos, e.g. the UBC Tuum Est video, and asked if I could upload these to YouTube which was the start of our Faculty YouTube channel. I am happy to say that these 4 videos alone have accummulated more than 69,000 views within the last 2 years. It took less than an hour to create the channel, upload and tag the videos and start promoting it.
For a long time the Tuum Est video was a popular search result on keywords such as “ubc” and it still belongs to one of the top 5 UBC related videos based on video views. Actually, only the LipDub seems to have been viewed more often (granted way more often, congratulations to our students!) or maybe the UBC A Place of Mind video could have had more views if it hadn’t changed the channel a few times (and hence lost the view count). There could be a few other videos with more views that are hosted as individual files on multiple channels or with other providers such as Facebook, Vimeo or blip.tv.
In the last 2 years a lot has changed at UBC regarding video and I am excited about all these developments. UBC has a lot more channels, incl. the main YouTube EDU channel, and very good videos get produced that quickly catch up in video view count. The only thing still missing that I hope we will get going at some stage is a UBC video task force. If you are a Faculty or staff member, join this video group and we can start discussing ideas.
The changed landscape raised the question if I should continue our YouTube channel as it turns out that our unit has not produced a lot of videos ourself. Right now we have uploaded 32 videos. Here are the reasons why I will keep the channel:
- We use it as hosting platform for the videos we actually produce (a possible alternative would be to use the UBC Education channel which has advantages, e.g. no length limit, and disadvantages, e.g. no commercial/advertising style videos).
- The videos we did produce, e.g. the Four Year Fellowship video, were very successful on YouTube which is not surprising given that 25% of all Google network search traffic happens on Youtube and opens up a huge audience for our video content.
- Content curation is one of the big buzzwords these days and it works well directly on YouTube, esp. after the latest update to the channels. With playlists, notes and featured tab we can provide additional value by mixing and matching content of interest to our audience without having to upload a single video.
- Only with our own account we have full access to all channel settings and can focus on everything that is related to graduate education at UBC, incl. life in Vancouver and BC, UBC’s research excellence, research facilities etc.
How do we know if our channel is successful?
We can obviously use the Insights page to find out about the channel, subscribers and videos. But without many own videos, we cannot utilize all the metrics that evolve around videos itself. It leaves options such as subscribers and channel views. YouTube currently does not display the metric “channel views” anymore. I believe in Nov 2011 they ran into some issues with the tracking and after the channel redesign, it does not get publicly displayed anymore. By using videos that we do not own, we cannot influence the end slates or description to drive traffic to our site which we could monitor in web analytics. So, it really comes down to subscribers as the remaining metric.
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