Journey to get $500,000 USD

[hongdou]

update
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Other than the 6 original videos that were detected in the beginning things are looking good. I have gotten about 69 total organic views. That's 69 views spread over 14 pieces of content though although it is pretty obvious which ones are winners and which ones are losers from the early numbers, or at least that's how it seems to me.

as you can see from these screen grabs, some pieces are a lot more popular than others.

upgraded
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Maybe this was common knowledge but I just had this realization that to really be profitable you need a lot of eyes looking at your content. You can get a lot of eyes from going "viral" as is sometimes said or you can get a lot of eyes from consistent uploading of unique content.

Now "going viral" and winning the lottery probably have the same odds but consistently uploading fresh and unique content is quite hard. Also how can you be sure what you're producing will have an audience who actually cares enough to go watch it.

I was thinking about these two paths and I came across something that is pretty crazy, now it most likely won't solve the viral path but being able to provide fresh new content that is unique. I think I might have stumbled across something and I will be working on it.

It's totally not black hat but I will doing black hat things with this journey and non black hat things. As far as links clicked? None yet!


question
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How can I take a large screen so that I don't have to make silly 3 piece posts like I keep doing to show my progress?

 

[Salexes]

You can use this chrome plugin for larger screens: Full Page Screen Capture

 

[MafiaBoss]

nice case study, i like your attitude and determination towards your goal, belief me even if you don't achieve your goal you will still learn a lot more.... keep going...

 

[hongdou]

Update
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Okay came back to do a check on my video progress. It seems one more pieces of content got copyright issues. I like that when you do encounter copyright issues YT is kind enough to point out where so that you can take a look and compare. Their algorithms are pretty damn amazing, it seems like the do a lot of DSP to clean up whatever tricks you tried to do. I like this game you play YT!

Dealing with YT automatic copyright tools, I am creating new tools to work harder at totally bypassing them. I think that I have come up with something and I will test it out on another set of content, that I will split test against this version and see which one comes out on top.

That being said 13 out of my 20 pieces of content has no copyright issues and I am getting a lot of views, exhibit A:

exhibit B:

Like I said earlier, you can clearly see some pieces of content that are more popular and more searched for than others.

These are not great numbers but they are a start. From all of this my adfly-style links have gotten 3 views and I have earned $0.001. At this rate I would die before I make any money.

Thoughts
-------------
Making money on web2.0 is mostly about getting as much eyes on your products, even though you might be selling products web2.0 the people are also the products. Think of web2.0 as a giant waterfall and you are the dam. If you can build your dam in a place that has massive volume of water "web2.0 users", they'll be the engine to your profits. If you make viral content it's like you just built your own waterfall but it will eventually run out of juice.

If you find what people are looking for and put your dam right in front of that flood of people, they will constantly power your dam. Take from that what you wish.

I will also create a 100% white hat channel in the coming weeks to test my theory of dams. I might post about it here but taking this black hat
journey I am picking up useful gems.

 

[himanuzo]

How long will you get the $500K with YT? 1 year? 2 years? 3 years?

For creating new videos, I suggest you to do outsourcing, so you can save your time.

 

[hongdou]

How long will you get the $500K with YT? 1 year? 2 years? 3 years?

For creating new videos, I suggest you to do outsourcing, so you can save your time.

I guess a hard deadline would add more spice to this mix. I wasn't thinking of anything more than a year. $500,000 in under a year should be more than doable, especially after what I explained in my last post.

UPDATED GOALS
---------------------------
$500,000 USD with proof before December 1, 2016
========================================

I am pretty confident that I can reach this goal.

Looking around at the journey threads I see a lot of people who quit. I think it's once they realize the amount of manual labor that's required to "build a dam" in front of a raging waterfall or river. Although I've seen many people even fail to find the river or waterfall to power their dam.

What's interesting about the second picture in my above post is that, even though I have other YT accounts that are white hat and done out of just passion for the subject. I do not upload so often and my content is very technical, not a lot of people understand or search for these topics. With that being said, a 6 year old YT account I have never seen a real time report, it has always said not enough data and just showed the static analytics.

With this one new channel w/ grey hat content, I am getting consistent views, real time reporting, and even estimated views for the last 48 hours. The image above was showing an estimate of 470 views in the last 48 hours. It is now up to an estimated 500 views for the last 48 hours. Even though the estimated views for the last 60 minutes dropped from 26 to 22. This is an estimated 500 views every 2 days from 13 pieces of content, I have thousands of pieces of content that I could optimize and upload. I will continue to do a few by hand but once it's all sorted out, the next thing I will do is write tools to just grind through this process. It's a hunting game with YT for now and I am working on my Ghillie suit!

-------
edit
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Just for comparison I went to my total white hat 6 years old YT account to look at the real time stats. Here they are:

as you can see that's pretty pathetic, especially compared to a YT channel that's less than 1 day old.

I haven't made any money with this journey yet but I'll go ahead and say this now. To make money you need to find a river and put a dam or windmill in it so that the natural movements of the current throws off a little energy in your direction. I think that should pretty clear to anyone with a brain.

 

[hongdou]

Update
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This has been quite interesting, I still only have 13 active videos but they are constantly being watched. The data is so fresh that analytics hasn't even caught up with them yet:

So I just have to real-time estimates to go after.

Estimated views for last 48 hours 680 estimated views for last 60 minutes 14:

No one is following through my links though, that's bad news. I think because this channel is new with only 13 videos and no comments although some videos have likes and some have dislikes:

For right now I can let YT collect the analytics data so that I can take a look at them, my guess is engagement is pretty crap. Probably 10-30% retention views.

Thoughts
-------------
I will need comments on these videos saying thanks for the DL link, great share, etc.. to get better click through for my links.

Looking for my videos in the YT serps they are on hovering around page 10 or so, popping up to page 8 on a few occasions and I was thinking..... How am I getting consistent views if my videos are so far back in the SERPS. My current theory is YT is using the tags provided by the videos to do split testing on other channels or users who have similar tags. Where else could the views come from? No one scrolls to page 10, not even page 8 searching for content on YT or Google, do they?


Additional Thoughts
----------------------------
I have been working on a new algorithm to combat YT's aggressive content ID system. I am sure that I have discovered a new method to bypass YT content ID. It has worked flawlessly on the 6 pieces of content that were originally flagged in this test. The good news about this new algorithm is that users who do complete the surveys and get the instructions will be able to get what they are looking for, so that makes me feel better since everyone gets what they want.

 

[CommonCents]

SMART GOALS

Time bound - Realistic....

500K in 6 month, unless you pull a mad stunt...

 

[hongdou]

SMART GOALS

Time bound - Realistic....

500K in 6 month, unless you pull a mad stunt...

Why set realistic goals when you can shoot for the sun? I guess developing the internet so that we can chat was realistic, or a super computer in your pocket was realistic, maybe airplanes, spaceships, wifi or anything that makes life comfortable. I don't make realistic goals, I shoot for the sun.

If you set your goals to make 1, 2, 10, 100 dollars per day you just might achieve it, then you lose it, end up at zero and that's the worst feeling in the world.


Update
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For only having 13 pieces of content up, I am feeling pretty good about these view count estimates. Right now the data is still too fresh to get real analytics report but I have to say in my other channel that does all white hat, higher level educational things I never see data like this

I can imagine scaling this up to having 2000 pieces of content and these numbers would look insane. Although even with these numbers I've still only earned three clicks and $0.01 USD. Either no one is clicking on the links or this link shortener is doing something shady. Since I don't have my engagement numbers yet, I'll error on the side that nobody is clicking on the links.

traffic spike
----------------

That's not important to me though, the best part is being able to build a river and direct that traffic towards my dam. Think about it like this, the reason a lot of top shelf IM say that you should build an email list is just that. You build your list and you have a massive amount of targeted traffic, you direct them towards your dam and you make bank. If no one else, at least I am getting a grasp on these concepts that while I've read them before, I never really understood them.... Until this journey!

 

[hongdou]

The good news about this new algorithm is that users who do complete the surveys and get the instructions will be able to get what they are looking for, It has worked flawlessly on the 6 pieces of content that were originally flagged in this test.

Yes, that's true.

Update
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These are some of the real-time analytics report, still not enough data to show analytics report yet.

There might be others with bigger YT channels but I have never seen so many active users and estimated users watching content that I have put online, although I am new to YT so that may be why. Especially for only have 13 that are actually watchable.

Anyone here on BHW play in YT have some real-time number screen shots they would like to share?

 

[MonsterMag]

Last Video uploaded: 2011

The video generating 90% of those views is from 2008 ^^

 

[hongdou]

Last Video uploaded: 2011
View attachment 80296
The video generating 90% of those views is from 2008 ^^

@MonsterMag That's pretty sick!
What I realized is that on YT good content can consistently bring in a lot of people which was a nice light bulb going off moment. I see a lot of modern YT guys/ gals constantly running on a never ending treadmill of pain. If they don't do a view on the newest ______ their channel starts to die.

This is a black hat thread but this process is giving me ideas about turning this into a total white hat method, I need to apply a few twists but then I could throw adsense on the video and just mostly relax.

@MonsterMag are you using adsense to monetize that video from 2008?

Though Experiment
---------------------------

I typically take in data from multiple sources and try to come up with something unique. I told you guys before about the YT channel that just upload 10 second clips of noise with a red and blue box on a white background. Then casually browsing I came across some guys on BHW talking about socialblade. I then remembered a really old YT guy, the new boston. I remember looking at a few of his programming tutorials so then I looked up his YT page and he was still posting. He posted a video as recently as 1 month ago.

What caught my eye though was this part of his YT channel banner

remembering social blade I flew over there to see what 4,200 videos can generate a guy who mostly uses adsense from what I can tell because his patreon is at a pathetic 24 patrons with only $121 USD per month. For a guy with over 1.2 million subs he had to be making some decent change. I hopped on socialblade and he seems to be doing just fine with adsense, if socialblade's numbers are accurate.

It's a very long and twisty tale but that's what inspired me to start this journey. I will continue with the black hat route but I also am looking into ways of being able to generate 8-10,000 pieces of unique content at least 30 minutes a piece to create a totally white hat YT channel with only adsense.

Just like most things G and YT it seems the prefer massive properties. I am pretty confident that I can achieve my goal.

Update
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I totally rewrote the software to bypass YT copyright content id system. I also wrote a program to take some content and process them and then output them in a standard place where I can upload them. I will test the six pieces of content that was originally caught by YT CID system to see if it totally bypasses it this time. Then i'll manually upload these pieces of content to YT for testing.

If that is successful then I will work on a tool to automatically upload a the pieces of content to YT servers.

There will still need to be some manual work, mainly for SEO my content. I don't want to write automated tools to scrape data, I can spend 10-20 minutes per content silo to do a little research get some relevant tags, etc... then feed that into my tools.

If these 6 pieces of content pass the test, I will add another 100 pieces of content by the end of this week to see if I can sustain +100 viewers in real time. Where did I get 100 number in that last sentence from? I made it up.

 

[hongdou]

Update
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This is fresh from YT, my first analytics report.

My video watch percentages seems pretty terrible to me. I would like them to be in 25-50% range.
I like that over 70% of my views comes from YT searches, that's awesome... My only guess on that is proper video tags
I don't know where the external views are coming from, most likely the social shares.
Another thing that pleases me is where my traffic is coming from; USA, UK, CA, AU, FR.... All top tier countries as far as monetization is concerned and there's absolutely no bot traffic on these videos.

Looking at all the additional data that YT provides wow. devices, countries, search terms, etc.... WOW. I want to parallel a white hat version of this method!

All in all these are decent numbers, I would like my view percentages to go up though. I will upload the other six pieces of content to see if YT CID can detect them.

 

[hongdou]

Update
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YT dropped the manual ban hammer on my channel today!!! There's some news, some might be considered bad and some good but I just consider it an opportunity to adapt and overcome.

What happened? My videos were getting a ton of views so some human went over to take a look at exactly what was going on, they left my channel like this:

Pretty much every video that was blocked worldwide had a manual review and then BAM, gone!

All I can say to this news is:

Haha, not really. I also find it interesting that they only claimed copyright on the audio part of the content when it's both audio and video, that's also very interesting to me. This is more video than audio, so why are they being so picky about the tiny audio portions? Maybe YT CID is not very good at picking up videos, even still this was a manual review so what gives YT, what gives?

This put the excitement back in the game, if I could just write such a simple algorithm and beat YT I would've felt cheated. It can't be that easy. This is what my real-time analytics look like now:

sad panda indeed!


What should be noted from the first image above is the 7 videos that were private. They passed through the manual review untouched, maybe because they were private? I don't know.

It's time to just re-upload the entire batch of content again, and see where how my anti YT CID bot compares against YT, CID and it's manual review team!
Here we goooooo

 

[hongdou]

Update
-----------
Earlier I was thinking of ways to improve my engagement and click through for my links. Now I am back to basically square 0 with a copyright strike as well. This is all that's left of the viewer ship from my V2 anti YT CID bot:

I got slapped pretty damn hard but what is interesting is even after a manual review of my channel some of my V2 anti YT CID bot videos are still alive and well. Still bringing in views as you can see from above.

This is what my channel dashboard looks like right now:

But this is just a bump in the road. I am pleased that after manual review some pieces of my V2 attempt content survived. This gives me ideas of what can be done to effectively bypass YT CID & most importantly human review. Let's keep playing YT, I enjoy this game.

So for now back to square ZERO.

I already uploaded the new batch of content as well. I'll fire this off and go do other things. Let's see what the channel looks like in the morning.

Things to consider
-------------------------
Even though my content was getting decent views, I noticed that not a lot of people clicked through, that might be a waste of time or might just be not enough engagement. For now I will error on the side of not enough engagement. Which leads me to think, how can I get more users to realize that if they click the link, they WILL in fact get what they want.

I could probably use some YT commenting service but that would put me on the radar in shady places that I prefer not to be seen in. I think I will create my own personal YT bots to comment.

This leads me to think that if users see just a default logo and 1 comment that will be a reason to pause instead of a reason to actually click the link. So another future problem just became clear. How can I get massive amounts of YT comments on my videos making it look natural to a human. I am sure YT can sniff out the fake comments and probably ghost them as well so these are just a few more bumps in the road that I can see.

What else can you throw at my YT CID?

Let round 3 begin

 

[hongdou]

Update
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My previous channel got smashed, I got careless uploaded too much content that were flagged and account got nuked.

I started uploading videos one at a time and made uploaded five in total so far:

Getting some minor views but nothing as good as yesterday's

I actually received one flag and then YT went and took a look, removed a video which this image below explains:

Well I took a look at their community guidelines, this video isn't spam, it isn't samey, it doesn't mislead searchers, it doesn't have hate, doesn't promote violence, no copyright etc... I took a look at all 7 areas of their guidelines and feel that these pieces of content should not have been flagged, especially since if one was flagged, all 5 should have been done the same.

Maybe this is the flagging behaviors I read so much about. I appealed just to see what they will say, in the meantime I am unable to upload on this channel so it's in limbo ATM.

If this content doesn't violate their community guidelines why is it blocked and why can't I upload? The YT game continues. All said, these are still solid number for four live videos in an ultra competitive niche. I will continue my work here because it is challenging and quite fun to do so!

I also have a great idea for a white hat method, it's similar to this but with a twist. I think i'll start another journey with that method and share the progress of that. I won't ditch this YT account unless it fails the dispute though, I strongly believe that I am in the right in this issue.

 

[hongdou]

Update
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I was getting tagged, not by YT CID but most likely by the way that I was editing my content. Here's another go at defeating flags from users.

These pieces of content might get taken down because of their "spamness" but it's just a test to see if my interpretation of the YT community guidelines are correct.

P.S.
I lost my appeal on the last account so this is a fresh one.

Sometimes you have to watch the shadows your foe cast on the ground to figure out their weaknesses. Let the games continue YT, let the games continue...

 

[hongdou]

Update
-----------
A little time has passed and my new content is still up and getting views:

If my current thesis is correct, then the content should be flag proof since it already bypasses YT CID. I would like it to be flag and YT human staff proof.

I will give this content another two days of real world testing and see if it stays alive. If it does then it will be time to massively scale up.


Something to think about
-----------------------------------
Constantly creating YT accounts uploading content and then having it flagged and taken down is really deflating. Luckily for me I wrote a few bots that I can throw at a group of content and it will give me YT ready content.

There is still a little manual labor involved which mostly has to deal with me hitting the upload button and copy pasting my title, descriptions and tags. I have to say having the bots do about 45% work now really saved me manually tweaking & trying new ways to bypass YT CID.

If this works properly, I will then continue to work on my bots to make sure that I can point them at a group of content and they do the conversions, upload, fill out metadata, etc...

For now I am pleased with my current progress though.

YouTube let's continue to play, shall we?

 

[Bubble5]

Big goal go for it!

 

[nobodyelsein]

While YouTube Adsense isn't really my thing at all I'm really enjoying how well you are thinking this out and sharing.