Hey, Scott here!

We're having cake! Would you like a slice?

I know, I know, it isn’t cool to talk about your views and your stats. But this is a big milestone for Tights and Fights: Ashes, so I thought a short celebratory post here wouldn’t be so out of line.

I just noticed that we passed 10,000 upload views on our main YouTube channel, Tights and Fights.

We were hoping to hit this mark around next week or the end of the month, so we’re a tiny bit ahead of schedule. (The first time we haven’t been scrambling to make a deadline!) The reason we reached this target today is due to a series of misadventures with Google Adwords.

We knew we could bring in a certain number of views just organically and through promotion. We were getting around 1000 veiws a week, and while we had better days and worse days, it looked like we were holding steady. So we thought we would turn on our advertising to our YouTube channel and see what happens.

It was around then that we discovered that some of our other show sites had been hacked. We had no idea that visitors were being redirected to other, less than savoury destinations until Google pulled our Adwords account. It was a bit of ashock – mostly for poor Christopher as he is managing all of that.

That meant we need to rely on the new Adwords account we were setting up. The problem – Google makes no guarantee of when they will approve your campaign. The web isn’t really set up for split second timing. Most websites apply for their campaign and sit back and wait until whenever it gets approved. It can take up to 4 months! Well, we didn’t want to wait four months.

And Christopher had a plan.

He had read somewhere (don’t ask me where he gets this stuff) that Google may be more inclined to approve your campaign in a hurry of you are spending more money. So we upped our ad bid from about $10 a day (which we were going to use as a short of shake down campaign) to $400 a day. Still no word.

(As a quick aside to those who don’t know, in these cases you bid a certain daily budget, and whenever someone clicks on your ad, you spend a penny or whatever the click rate is for your exact keywords.)

No word, that is, until we showed up this morning to discover that not only the campaign had been approved, but we had already spent our full bid!

YouTube is weird for tracking stats. I have learned to accept that anything sooner than a full week in the past isn’t really a reliable figure – your view counts continue to change as YouTube catches up. So we think our numbers will continue to climb as YouTube tracks the mass number of people who clicked on our ad and were transported to our YouTube channel.

But for right now, we have officially passed 10,000 views on our main channel. Added to those view number are the views on our secondary YouTube Channels and visits to our website, etc. So, we’re happy with that. Even if it was a surprise!

As a quick additional note, it also seems like our strategy of having lots of short videos is working beautifully. The idea is that whatever efforts we do to bring in a single view is leveraged and amplified by a bulk of content. For instance, say we spent 1 dollar to being in 1 view – if that person watches 10 episodes, it lowers our real costs from 1 dollar a view to 10 cents a view. (Or if we spent 10 minutes tweeting or in YouTube activity to bring that view in, the amplifier idea still applies.)

We designed Tights and Fights: Ashes to be very discoverable on the internet. And so far, so good.