YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

By Alan Lastufka, Michael W. Dean
November 2008
Pages: 301
ISBN 10: 0-596-52114-6 | ISBN 13: 9780596521141
Press Release
(4) (Average of 4 Customer Reviews)

Description

If you want to make a splash on YouTube with your videos, this book shows you what it takes. It's written by two YouTube veterans who know how to make quality video art, and have the subscribers and millions of views to prove it. They'll take you through the basics, and will teach you how to write, shoot, edit, optimize, upload, and promote your work.
Full Description

Want to make a splash on YouTube? Even go viral? You've come to the right place. This book is written by two veteran 'Tubers who live their art and know what they're talking about -- especially Alan Lastufka, a.k.a. "fallofautumndistro," who has over 13,000 YouTube subscribers and over 4 million views. Alan and co-author Michael W. Dean show you how to make a quality video, and how to optimize, encode, upload, and promote it. This book can't promise you'll be rich and famous, but it can tell you how to make great video art, and what you need to do to get your work seen. You'll learn about:

Storytelling and directing
Shooting, editing, and rendering
Creating your very own channel
Broadcasting user-generated content
Re-broadcasting commercial content
Cultivating a devoted audience
Fitting into the YouTube community
Becoming a success story

Join Alan, who makes part of his living from YouTube, and Michael, a successful filmmaker, author, and D.I.Y. art pioneer. They'll take you from the basics of gear to making it big on YouTube, with a focus on networking and interaction. You'll also sit in on informative interviews with YouTube stars LisaNova, Hank Green (vlogbrothers), WhatTheBuckShow, nalts, and liamkylesullivan.

Alan and Michael understand viral marketing -- and they know what it takes to get your work on everyone's YouTube radar. And, once you read this book, so will you.

Featured customer reviews

YouTube: An Insider's Guide, February 24 2009

Rating:

Submitted by Anonymous Reader [Respond | View]

An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts
by Dave Roman, GCPCUG Member

This O’Reilly Press book was written by authors Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean.
Everybody’s talking about UTUBE on the internet even though it was launched in 2005. It’s an amazing phenomenon and this book tells you all about it in 15 chapters. One of the opening statements tells you what you’re in for. “If you’re smart (and you are smart because you picked this book), talented (and you are talented because this book attracted you and this book is about talent and vision), and have some good ideas, you’ll have a really good chance of getting your work seen.”

Chapter 1 - What is This YouTube of Which You Speak?
This chapter is basically a history of YouTube. You also get information about navigating YouTube and what it means to go viral. A viral video is one that is so funny, so outrageous that it is immediately shared from one viewer to the next and on and only goes like the flu.

The first viral video, which has been viewed 700 million times, is the “Star Wars Kid”. Go to: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6vilBmU (URL 1.4).

Chapter 2 - Storytelling and Directing and Chapter 3 – 99 Cent Film School: Shooting, Editing and Rendering
This chapter tells you about making quality videos that people will watch and pass on to friends. You will also learn how to edit and render videos to upload them to YouTube. The secret is in “story telling” and conflict. You only have two minutes to create a likeable character and a plot.

The 3rd chapter helps you with editing your film. They talk about what not to shoot and why, as well as location, lighting and props. There are good examples of how to edit the film, almost taking you step by step.

Chapter 4 - Creating Your Very Own Channel
This chapter takes you through the step by step process of registering your channel and then “Pimping Your Profile”. What other social networking sites call your profile, YouTube calls your channel, just like a TV channel.

In order to load videos to YouTube, you must register. You can watch videos without registering, but in order to get “into the act”, you must be a registered user. This chapter also covers privacy issues and terms of use.

Chapter 5. Broadcasting Yourself: User-Generated Content
This chapter is about uploading your video to YouTube so everyone can see your production. Make sure your video is appropriate. (Not pornographic or violent), anyone can FLAG a video they deem as inappropriate and they must also click on a reason why they think it is inappropriate. This must be a common happening because there is even a page about “contacting YouTube while upset.”

Chapter 6. Rebroadcasting: Commercial Content
Here he teaches you about using other people’s work in your videos. Why would you worry about using other people’s work? This leads to talking about copyrights, fair use and parody and public domain. Public Domain is material where the copyright has expired. It can be a song, a book or even a work of art. You can find out about public domain and lists of available “stuff” by typing in public domain in your search engine.

This chapter even shows you where to get FREE material for your YouTube project. Go to http://creativecommons.org

One of the tricks for copying YouTube videos is as follows:
1) Copy the video URL as it begins to play.
2) Go to: www.videodl.org
3) Paste in the URL and click GO
4) When the download button appears, click on it
5) After downloading, use rename to change the file type to FLV
6) Then go to www.media-convert.com
7) Select the file in browse
8) Use the “NO VIDEO RESET” and Windows Bitmap settings
9) Accept
10) Then DOWNLOAD when the button appears

I’ve used this procedure a number of times.

Chapter 7. Building Your Audience
This is like creating “traffic” on your web site. They give you ways of building your audience legally.

Chapter 8. The Community: Where Do You Fit In?
This chapter is all about networking and collaborating. It’s just like it sounds. You may like someone’s video and leave a comment. You may even work out a deal to make a video with this person. A cute video recommended in this chapter is
www.youtube.com/user/fiveawesomegirls (URL 8.6).

Chapter 9. Hacking the System: How to Cheat (and Why You Shouldn’t)
In this chapter, one of the authors shares what he’s learned about nefarious dealings on YouTube. They define acceptable behavior and what can get you kicked out for good.

One interesting way of cheating is “autorefreshing”. If you have a video on YouTube, you can continue hitting the refresh button every 5 seconds which is 12 views a minute and 720 views per hour. They say this will rocket your video to the Most Viewed list. That’s a No-No. You’ll learn a few more ways of hacking in this chapter.

Chapter 10. Reaching the World
Here they talk about the social networking world of YouTube, blogging, vlogging, signatures and social bookmarking.

Chapter 11. Money Money Money!
This is the money chapter. They tell you how to monetize your work.

Chapter 12. Beyond The Tube
Learn how to create your own identity, independent of YouTube, and tricks of time budgeting which allows more time away from your computer.

Chapter 13. Becoming a Success Story
This sounds interesting. They tell you how to become featured on YouTube’s front page and maybe even on the evening news. You might even turn up first in Google searches. How’s that for publicity?

Chapter 14. Closing Arguments
This chapter is just a little philosophy by the authors.

Chapter 15. Interviews with Other YouTube Rock Stars
This one is obvious. The authors interview some of the huge stars of YouTube. This is almost like “American Idol”. They interview 5 interesting YouTube people. Lisa Nova is the 24th most subscribed channel of all time on YouTube. She eventually became a MADtv cast member as a result of her YouTube videos. She was also featured in the New York Times, AdWeek, and Wired magazine. You can see her on:
www.youtube.com/user/LisaVisa (URL 15.2)
www.lisanovalive.com (URL 15.3)

This is a great YouTube book. If you know nothing about YouTube, this book will make you an expert, especially if you’re over 30. Do you want to learn from an expert? Ask any kid in High School!

Don't watch the media, be the media, February 23 2009

Rating:

Submitted by Allen Stenger [Respond | View]

This is a thorough introduction to creating videos for YouTube, aimed at the absolute beginner. It is especially strong on explaining how to tell a story and on how to behave yourself as part of the YouTube community. The emphasis is on making art, not on making money.

It is not a techie book. There's a long chapter called "99-Cent Film School" that covers the mechanics of creating a video, but it's very basic and deals mostly with the selection of equipment, with some discussion of editing. The book is unusual in that it is not Macintosh-centric: the authors use Windows and claim there's no need to consider Macintosh because Windows is cheaper and has more software.

The authors summarize their position on p. 248 as "Don't watch the media, be the media." This is a good sound bite and gives the flavor of the book, although it is not really accurate since they encourage watching and commenting on the videos of other YouTubers. (Besides, if no one watched the media, would there be any media left?) The authors detest traditional media, especially television, and they detest much of the new media too. This doesn't have much impact on the book, except to cause occasional outbursts of gratuitous nastiness. For example, on p. 244 we read, "Social networking provides websites to people who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a computer." Although there's some truth in this, it is unnecessary to state it here. The isolation from other media also gives the impression that YouTube is its own universe, with no connection to anything else.

The nastiness comes out in concentrated form in the Preface, which attempts to explain "Why You Should Buy This Book" by trashing the competition. Be sure to skip this section of the book! It's not representative of the rest and reading it will turn you off from an otherwise-good book.

There are a number of rough spots that could have been improved by better copy-editing. The book is somewhat rambling. Although it does explain all the YouTube and computer jargon, it may use a term many times before defining it. For example, the term "partner" is used throughout the book but is not explained until Chapter 11. The index is often no help; "partner" is not in the index as such (you have to look under YouTube Partners), and acronyms such as RSS and NLE are not indexed at all.

YouTube URLs are cryptic pseudo-random character strings, and a Very Good Feature of the book is that the authors have placed every URL as a hyperlink on one page on their web site, so you just have to click it. This is not quite as good as feature as it could be, because the cryptic URLs on that page are not annotated other than with a cross-reference number such as "URL 9.3"; if each had a short description or title the page would be easier to navigate and would also be great for browsing.

Re: To be famous on Youtube, this book may be just the ticket, December 23 2008
Submitted by Michael W. Dean |

[Respond | View]

Howdy, co-author of the book here.

The three squished images that got squished in page layout have been fixed for the second pressing (which went to press last week).

And I addressed this, at length (in agreement with you) in Chapter 14, Closing Arguments"): "My only fear is that my results will be similar to those of all the people who suddenly flooded my environment with home made newsletters when such software became available. Let me tell you, it takes more than a program to make newsletters and videos - creativity, knowledge, and experience come to mind."

Thank you,
Michael W. Dean

Read all reviews

To be famous on Youtube, this book may be just the ticket, December 18 2008

Rating:

Submitted by Edmonton Linux Users Group [Respond | View]

The book's title points directly to the intended audience - those who want
to create a large subscriber audience to their video creations on the
social networking site, Youtube. But I guess I'm not part of that
audience. I actually think social networking wastes a lot of time that
could be more productive socializing directly with people (or doing
anything else, for that matter). Nevertheless, that's a lifestyle
judgment, and my purpose is to review a book, not get on a soap box.

So, you may ask, just why did I elect to read this book? Two reasons. One
was to better understand the commercial possibilities of the social
networking medium, and the other was to learn something I can apply to
doing my own web videos. Normally, I would get professionals to do what
they do best, but this time there's little budget, and they still need to
get done. My only fear is that my results will be similar to those of all
the people who suddenly flooded my environment with home made newsletters
when such software became available. Let me tell you, it takes more than a
program to make newsletters and videos - creativity, knowledge, and
experience come to mind.

And the authors seem to have these things in fair measure. There is a good
amount of useful information made available, and there are links to much
more, even for my more narrow interests. However, I still felt that, for
what I wanted, it was still lacking. There seems to be more weight given
to the less technical information, such as how the community works,
building an audience following, cheating the system, and other, related
social networking sites.

The book is quite readable, and I found that I have more in common with
the authors than I expected, especially given our differing opinions on
Youtube, itself. My main critique, as usual, has to do with the editing.
The one thing that pops out are the diagrams indicating time proportions
for storylines, and they are obviously not proportional at all.

Bottom line: If it is your goal to be famous on Youtube, this book may be
just the ticket to help you get there, or show you why you won't.

Also reviewed at http://elug.ca/reviews/youtube_an_insiders_guide.shtml (http://elug.ca/reviews/youtube_an_insiders_guide.shtml)

You Tube reviewed, December 17 2008

Rating:

Submitted by Ellis Brayham [Respond | View]

"YouTube- an insiders guide", reviewed by Ellis Brayham, ApplesBC Computer Society.

O'Reilly kindly sent us this new book, "YouTube, an insiders guide", by Michael W. Dean. Its claim to fame is the self described, "This is the only YouTube book worth getting". Well, that's a pretty lofty claim to make, and because of my limited working knowledge of YouTube I will limit my review of this book to the things I do know.

YouTube is a barely 3 year old program, developed by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, and aided by another PayPal pioneer Jawed Karim, who together designed this video sharing program. It proved to be instantly popular, and after only a year, was bought by Google for $1.6 billion!

YouTube has become the top video site, hosting every thing from homemade videos to millions of commercial sites, plus political, educational, social sites, and everything in between. With the Google inspired search capability, it is increasingly being used as a sales medium, and this is the direction this book encourages you to explore.

Some of the things I liked about this book are the hands on approach, so that even a novice gets a quick understanding of the medium, its potential, the legal side implications, site promotion, examples of what you can get and do for free, as well as quite a detailed explanation of the costs of building a larger site. I confess I didn’t realize the commercial possibilities, and opportunities of YouTube. It has become a huge business opportunity and with this book its possible for just about anyone to seize the opportunity to promote their pet project - whether selling something, promoting a political party, or just showing off.

On the other hand, an aspect of the book I didn't like was the self importance of the author, but if you can ignore that, the information in the book is worth every penny.

Here's a 21st century marvel - a unique idea that has made the web a birthing place for unlimited business opportunities, just like Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, iTunes etc. etc. each of which have created multi millionaires, who took the boundless possibilities of the web, and found within it, a need that they could fill. That's the very essence of this book - here is YouTube, here are the tools - now get out there and make it your own.

Media reviews
"This is the only YouTube book worth getting."
-- Lisa Nova, YouTube star, former MadTV cast member

"No one knows more about building a fan base than YouTube star Alan Lastufka. Alan and his co-author, the well-known independent filmmaker Michael W. Dean, will show you a variety of effective strategies for becoming more popular. Proceed into the wisdom of this book, and I look forward to seeing you pass me on the YouTube most subscribed list."
-- John Green (vlogbrothers) YouTube Star & Author

"I found a lot to like in this book. It would best be used by someone under 35 who isn't trying to be "conventional" in their marketing approach. A good and honest introduction in how to use YouTube to get the word out."
-- Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Web Marketing Today

Read all reviews

See larger cover

Book Trailer

"This is the only YouTube book worth getting."
--Lisa Nova, YouTube star, former MadTV cast member