This thread is the reason that we are active on this forum, it is also the catalyst that we needed to dip our toes into the water with FireViews. We're a sketch comedy channel that promotes on Fireviews, we have not been paid to endorse the service only our experience has motivated us to do so.
Over the past days we have had a tremendous boost in our quality viewership. When traffic comes to a YouTube Viewer, most of your audience is not logged in to an account-- you must make incredibly compelling material for viewers to take the time to leave feedback. The relationships that you build with fellow producers are invaluable; we all understand the stakes of a Like and Comment. As a reward for watching videos and earning free FireViews, we've met a few comedy troupes, musicians and artists that we'd love to collaborate with soon. It's not a new idea to the platform, these behaviors are fundamental to YouTube Promotion-- FireViews simply implements common courtesy (which is something that many internet viewers have never heard of). Whenever a comment is left on a video, it carries over to our YouTube page. We gained likes and dislikes alike from the service on account of the attachment of a comment-- so negative feedback is possible, but who doesn't mind a little controversy brewing on your feed? These comments and reviews through like minded YouTube users have motivated us to promote our work in more difficult arenas amid the vast expanses of the world wide web. This service trumps our previous social networking tools in connectivity and efficiency. We have thousands of real friends that are less active in our work now than fellows we've met through FireViews. Not every friend cares about YouTube's analytics when you post to Facebook -- and comments on Zuckerbergs behemoth are kept there to wither not transferred to the embedded video. That's such a crucial element of FireViews.
We've had a great experience and we'll be using FireViews to promote our channel until we're sick of getting noticed, however the weakness of the service may be one of the core principles. Because the promotion of your video is based upon watching other work the service is a a roulette of sorts. There are no categories, and the service is flooded with younger producers that are in violation of SOPA/PIPA. Thankfully that bill did not pass, but the number of video game walk throughs or lyric videos is quite dense. It's just a byproduct of an open promotional tool, but with everyone winning a trophy for the past few decades-- there's a rampant lack of restraint of self-promotion in these waters. We keep our content short and original. Never promoting a video over three minutes on the service, as we understand that to benefit from fellow promoters we must keep our content interesting and succinct. There are more 15 minute screen captures of video games than one could possibly watch, fortunately the skip button allows you to channel surf until you find original content. For this reason, we agree that anonymous viewing cannot be an option in this arena, that is after all the basic function of YouTube, and without categories you'll find that the audience that is watching your videos may not be in the mood for what you're promoting. Having to take accountability for what you say to a fellow, really discourages negative feedback that may be entirely situational. FireViews divides the content between "Original" and "Someone else's" in the upload operation for a new profile, but we'd like to see further division into categories of unique original material versus creative commons protected content.
Once you're active in the community and exercising proper etiquette-- this is a brilliant tool for building an audience. If only the site recognized annotations it would be a perfect tool for releasing a flagship video (there are links provided back to YouTube on the side. But if we're any indication of rest of the users, those only get clicked 3% of the time.) With that said, we understand this service to keep in line with YouTube's T.O.S., we've received no strikes against our account. And all of the research that we did prior to promoting through the channel reinforced the same idea. This is a legitimate way to find your audience in a flood of tens of thousands of daily uploads in a post Google YouTube.
Thanks for great service, we'll spare you as we take over the world.
