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You are here: Home / Miscellaneous / Write a 10 Page Novel?

Write a 10 Page Novel?

posted on June 1, 2014

YouTube can be a great resource centre for writers. Either find videos related to the art, craft and practice of writing, or, search for background or ideas about a plot, a character or a scene.

In searching through YouTube there is a culling process! You need to sort the useful from the useless and that can take time. Even the useless can trigger something for you.

Take this as a case in point.

I simply searched for a topic and filtered results for the last 7 days to get fresh material.

Most of the results came from one source – so I decided to look at one of them. I was intrigued to see the content for “How to Write a 10 Page Novel”.

What I found was very poor content quality. However what intrigued me was the production of the video.

All the videos from this source were around 1-1.5 minutes in length. Each had an automated robot voiceover. Each covered about 3 points and showed a website and then it’s link for each point. Judging from the first one I looked at below, the relevancy of each website to the topic was not high.

So it appears that these videos were all auto-produced to a formula for the sole purpose of ranking in some way. Gaming the system.

And that is a shame. The internet is increasingly filled with dross and hopefully Google will clean out this kind of gaming in its next change.

In the meantime, the whole concept of automated content research, production and delivery gives me an idea for a short story with a sci-fi twist ….

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Category: MiscellaneousTag: writing videos

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Comments

  1. Jan Kearney

    June 1, 2014 at 10:45 pm

    Unfortunately, video is seen as an easy way to get rankings – and easier to game. That video was horrific though. Can’t stand automated voices either. Not sure what the point of that video was as there was no link back to a website so it’s not driving traffic.

    • Melanie Day

      June 2, 2014 at 5:09 am

      Yes, it was horrible wasn’t it? No idea what their purpose is yet.

  2. Misty Spears

    June 1, 2014 at 11:55 pm

    It really is a shame but not much that can be done about it. The problem is so many people are creating content niche sites so it’s going to happen. But glad to see it gave you an idea for a new short story!

    • Melanie Day

      June 2, 2014 at 5:10 am

      You have to find something positive out of everything, really! Thanks for stopping by, Misty.

  3. Amanda Thomas

    June 2, 2014 at 3:56 am

    On the bright side, with all of those lame videos it means that a human video (even if it’s not top quality) will stand out. I use an old webcam that isn’t even all that good and my videos do well because there is a human face sharing real information instead of a robot. Sure, an HD cam would be better but they’re miles ahead of the robot videos.

    • Melanie Day

      June 2, 2014 at 5:18 am

      Absolutely, Amanda. A real person is so much more engaging – and I liked your tips today, too.

  4. Ana

    June 2, 2014 at 4:59 am

    It used to be like that looking for information on Google but they seem to have cleaned that up a bit. I’m sure they’ll do the same with YouTube too. It must be harder to detect dross automatically though.

    • Melanie Day

      June 2, 2014 at 5:18 am

      True that. No idea how they would identify it but I’m sure they will give it a pounding somehow!

  5. Bonnie Gean

    June 2, 2014 at 5:20 am

    Ugh, I dislike the automated voice. 🙂

    I don’t understand what the point is of ranking with the video if they didn’t even include a link back to their website with a description. How’s that for wasted time?

    They would do better simply by using a real person, pointing to each website. Oh well, live and learn. 🙂

    • Melanie Day

      June 2, 2014 at 7:14 am

      I suspect the creator is not English-speaking which may account for the automated voice. But there seems no point to the video, does there?

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