Happy 4th of July from a small sampling of our sun-soaked family (and many of their respective family members) at the Outskirts Press summer picnic. From our family to yours, have a wonderful and safe 4th of July holiday. See more pictures from the picnic on our blog.
A number of posts ago I mentioned our YouTube branded channel and the functionality called “overlays.” I also expressed some frustration that in order to show an overlay on our videos we had to indicate that ads could appear on our branded channel. My feeling was that part of the reason behind branding a channel on YouTube was to have control over the appearance of other advertisements, and yet, I wanted to be able to display overlays. It seemed as if I couldn’t do one without authorizing the other.
I was able to get that issue addressed by an actual human being at Google, and here’s what I found out: Adsense ads appear on branded YouTube channels if one or more of the videos on that channel featured “claimed content.” Claimed content is YouTube’s classification of videos that may or may not feature copyright protected materials (images or music). YouTube uses a pretty impressive algorithm to identify potential copyright issues at the uploading stage, but it’s not perfect. So once I cleared up that misclassification for a few of our book videos, we were able to set up our YouTube branded channel to display our overlay (which now features our $500 promotion) and at the same time no longer display any other ads. The system — after some effort — works!
Help a Reporter Out at www.helpareporter.com is precisely the kind of site all business-people and authors should know about. Last week I had a great interview with the editor of Celebrity Parent magazine about Adventures in Publishing and Outskirts Press. This lead came entirely from HARO. In fact, it came from a HARO request I replied to in February of 2009. Yes, nearly a year later the editor contacted me for an interview! And what a wonderful and gracious person she was.
What’s the moral of that story? The Internet provides you with the means to cast as many fishing lines as possible into the virtual sea. You never know when you’re going to get a bite. But, to paraphrase Gretzky’s great quote — one of my favorites in case you can’t tell — you are guaranteed to miss 100% of the fish you don’t go after.
