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I know that a lot of video contest filmmakers hate it when contests let online voting help determine the winners.  So do I.  I can’t even imagine how many contests I would have won if quality was the only thing that mattered to the judges.  But contest organizers LOVE online voting.  Every time a contestant asks for votes on facebook or twitter or on their blog, that’s free advertising for the sponsor.  And you can’t really blame contest organizers for wanting to get as much exposure for their company as possible.  After all, if it wasn’t for the publicity, most companies wouldn’t even bother running a contest in the first place.  So if you want to make money in video contests, you have just got to accept the fact that getting votes is just part of the game.  And once you do, you can start developing strategies to win vote-based competitions.

If you’re really serious about winning a contest, you’ll need to try and get votes from people outside of your social circle.   How do you do that?  Well I suggest you try the site GetOnlineVotes.com.  GOV is what contest junkies refer to as a “vote exchange.”  When a person needs votes in a contest they can post their link on GOV and ask for votes.  Then other people who need votes in other contests vote for that entry.  Then they post a comment that includes their own link and ask the original contestant to vote for them.  So basically, the whole thing is based on the premise, “you vote for me and I’ll vote for you.”

And it works.  It works great, actually.  I just learned abut the site recently but I’ve tried it 2 or 3 times now.  And if you really work the website, you can get dozens or even hundreds of votes from GOV.  But I’ve noticed a lot of people who use the exchange sabotage their chances by making some simple but key mistakes.  So I thought I’d make a quick list of tips to help you get more votes on GetOnlineVotes.com.

1. Before you post your vote request, make sure that swapping votes does not violate your contest’s rules.  Most contests don’t care where votes come from.  As long as they are getting web traffic or new sign ups or facebook fans, they’re happy.  But some contests prohibit offering “inducements” to get people to vote for an entry.  For example, I was recently in a contest sponsored by Excedrin and they had a “no inducements rule.”  Several contestants used GetOnlineVotes.com and all of them were disqualified!  So for sure, check before you post.
2. Keep it brief.  GOV gives you the option to say something about you or the contest you’re entering before you post your voting instructions.  You are required to fill in the space so keep it as brief as possible.  One sentence is all you need.  A huge explanation just makes it look like voting for you will be complicated.
3.  Make your instructions as easy as possible.  A wordy or confusing explanation will just scare voters away.  This seems like a no-brainer but a lot of people over-explain the voting process.  Just post the link, and present STEP 1, STEP 2, STEP 3, etc.  But be aware, if you really do have more than 2 or 3 steps, not many people are going to want to spend so much time on one vote.  The more votes people make, the more they get in return.  Just keep that in mind.
4. Promise that you will return all votes and ask people to leave their link.  This make other users feel like a vote for you will result in a guaranteed return vote.
5. Vote for everyone that leaves a comment on your post!  Some jerks will post their request, let people vote for them and then not return the favor.  So let people know that you are voting by replying to all comments.  If other users see that you are replying “I voted!” to every comment, they’ll know you’re good about returning votes.
6. Work the site.  Vote for other people and leave comments asking for return votes.  But try and focus on only voting for people who will actually vote for you in return.
7. Consider Re-Listing your Post after a few days.  GOV doesn’t allow you to post the same vote request over and over.  But for just $3.95 you can have your post put back at the top of the list of requests.

I was actually inspired to write this article because I just submitted a vote request to GetOnlineVotes.  So here’s what a nice, simple request looks like:

Click to view the actual listing

Granted, this isn’t exactly a typical GOV request because the “voting’ is done on youtube.  Most of the contests listed on the site are run through facebook.  Still, other GOV users are actually voting for my video.  All I need to do to win the $1,000 “Crowd Favorite” prize in this particular contest is get the most youtube likes.  And I think I can pull it off, fair and square.  I can get a lot of likes through youtube since I have more than 3,500 subscribers.  But GetOnlineVotes.com will probably be the thing that puts me over the top.  Of course, I’d certainly love to get some likes from you VCN readers.  So if you want to help me out, head here and give me a like.  Thanks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQAXJIuCS28

October 24th Update: I won the “Crowd Favorite” prize! Thanks for the votes everybody. I told you GOV works!

Today at 12pm Eastern, Gain detergent unveiled the 25 finalists in their million dollar, “Smell Like a Million Bucks” video contest.  But it’s not the “Top 25″ that anyone following this contest could have expected.  It now looks like Gain disqualified many of the entries that seemed like they were a safe bet to make the finals.

Gain was supposed to determine their finalists like this: each video would be given a creative score when it was submitted.  The score was based on a 5-star system.  Those stars were then converted to a percentage.   So if you got 5 stars, your score was 100%.  If you got 2 1/2 stars, your score was 50%.  Next, Gain took the number of views your video got during the contest-long viewing period and multiplied that number by your creative score.  So if you got 2,000 views and a creative score of 20%, your final score was 400.  According to the rules, this was the only method Gain would use to select their Top 25 finalists.

So if a video could get 5,000 views, there was no way it would NOT make the finals, right?  Even if a video had a creative score of 10%, 5,000 views would still give you a huge, final score.  But real views were actually tremendously hard to get in this contest.  For a view to be registered, a person had to log into facebook, accept the contest app, find the video they wanted to view and then watch it all the way to the end.  But while it was hard to get genuine views, it was really, really easy to generate fake views.  All a person had to do was create a few dozen or a few hundred fake facebook accounts and spend hours and hours watching their video every day for weeks.  And it looks like that’s exactly what a lot of people did.  But what those repeat-viewers didn’t realize is that it is really easy to detect that kind of cheating.  The third-party company running the contest application is able to see where views come from.  So if some idiot viewed their entry 50 times a day from the same computer, that would raise a big red flag even if they used 50 separate facebook accounts.  But it seems like there were a whole lot of idiots in this contest because for some mysterious reason, most of the “most viewed” videos did not make the finals.

Last Monday, as soon as the viewing period ended, all of the view counts on all of the entries disappeared.  I suspected that might happen so a few hours before the deadline, I took a screen shot of the 12 “most viewed” entries in the Gain contest.  The Red X’s indicate which of these “popular” entries did not make the finals and the Green Checks indicate the videos that did make the finals.

The (almost) final view counts of the 12 "most viewed" entries. I added the Red X's and Green checks to indicate the videos that did and did not make the finals

Take a look at those view counts.  Some of them are ridiculously high.  The video in first place has 8,449 views!  But out of the 480 videos that were submitted, only 22 had view counts higher than 1,000.  So 8,449 views is unnaturally high.  Now, many of these videos were actually pretty great.  And really, all of them are at least kind of decent.  But even if these videos all sucked and even if they recived a 10% creative score, 10% of 4,000 is 400.  And gain actually picked several finalist videos that had FEWER than 400 views.

So all of these Red X’ed videos must have been disqualified.  Gain of course can’t reveal WHY these entries didn’t make the Top 25 but there are only 3 explanations:

1. An entry could have gotten a creative score of ZERO.

2.  An entry could be disqualified for cheating.

3.  An entry could have been disqualified for breaking other rules like using “third party content” (music, images, SFXs) the entrant didn’t own.

There is no way any of these entries were bad enough to deserve a creative score of zero so reason #1 can’t possibly explain what happened.  Some of these entries do use “third party content” but a lot of the the videos in the finals do.  (Like this one)  So I don’t think Gain disqualified any of these submissions because they broke other rules.  So…that only leaves cheating.

I kept a close eye on the view count race in this contest and I can tell you, it looked like there was massive amounts of cheating happening.  Some videos recived 100′s of views every day like clockwork.  Others would suddenly gain 200 views in the middle of the night.  There was even one video that got just about 270 views every day!  What are the odds that the same number of people would watch the same video every day for several days in a row?  Or how about the video that was the 3rd Most Viewed?  That video has nothing in it that could possibly cause it to be disqualified.  That video was approved on June 22nd and by the view count deadline of July 11th, they had 5,150 views.  Does 257 views A DAY really seem realistic when most entries in this contest weren’t able to get 257 views during the entire viewing period?

So did all those people with Red X’s on their videos really cheat and fake their views?  There’s no way for us to know.  For the record, I’m not saying any of those people cheated for sure.  But the evidence suggests that they did SOMETHING to break the rules of the contest that got them disqualified.  I do want to say that I do NOT believe that the 2nd most viewed video cheated.  It was created by a reader of this site named Andrew D. and I know that he had an army of people working on getting him a lot of views.  But I do know that other contestants were trying to get him disqualified because he posted his video to youtube and that was sort of against the rules.  So, I think he might have been bounced on a technicality.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I actually entered this contest but I submitted my entry way too late.  I only managed to get about 400 views so I didn’t make the Top 25.  However, I absolutely have to applaud Gain and the company running the contest, Don Jagoda Associates for doing the right thing here.  It was against the rules to “view” your video over and over using fake accounts so anyone who did that deserved to be disqualified.  It’s nice to see that some companies actually care about running a fair, online contest.

HOWEVER…I also have to CONDEMN Gain for basically lying to contestants about how they were going to determine the winners. Even if Gain had to disqualify dozens and dozens of entries, there is simply no way that a video like this should have or could have made the finals:

Click to view

This video only received about 200 views.  So even if it got a perfect, 100% creative score, it still would have only had a creative score of 200 which wasn’t supposed to be enough to get it in the top 25.  But this video is so amazingly awful that there is no way it got a perfect creative score.  So how and why did it ever make the finals?

It’s clear that something seriously unethical did happen here.  Gain lied to their customers about how the winners would be picked.  So what can you do about it?  Jack shit, that’s what!  The finalists have been picked and there’s nothing you can do to fight Gain’s terrible decisions.

And so, the real contest now begins!  To be honest, I’m actually kind of relived I didn’t make it to the finals now that I know that Gain is willing to play fast and loose with the rules.  And on top of Gain’s shadiness, votes alone determine the winner of this contest.  So I can’t even imagine how horrible the next 2 weeks are going to be for the people in the finals.  If a finalist wants to have any chance of winning, they’re going to have to spend at least 60 hours a week begging for votes.  And if someone isn’t willing to work that hard on their campaigns, they might as well not even bother.  Because somewhere, among the finalists there are surely several people who ARE ready to take the next 2 weeks off from work and do nothing but scrounge for votes.  One of the people listed on this page is going to win a million dollars:  https://apps.facebook.com/gainmillionbucks. I can’t tell you specifically who the winner will be but I can tell you this, the prize will go to whoever is smart enough not to cheat and whoever is determined enough to dedicate every waking hour for the next 2 weeks to winning that million bucks.

Later this week I’m going to announce my picks and predictions for this contest.  So if you made the finals and want to let me know why you think you’re going to take home that million bucks, let me know:  VideoContestNews@gmail.com.

More on this in a moment...

I usually talk a lot of smack about video contests that let “the public” pick their winners via an online vote. The problem is that “the public” doesn’t care about some random video contest. The only people who do care enough to vote are the friends and family of the contestants. And when all those people have voted, the entrants usually just resort to creating a bunch of fake accounts. So the whole thing devolves into a battle of wills. The winner will be whoever spends the most time voting for themselves over and over.  And what’s really crazy is that often, the rules don’t specifically forbid this kind of activity so technically, it’s not cheating.  (big vote counts make it seem like the video contest was more popular and that makes the marketing people who designed it look good.)

I haven’t entered a vote-based video contest in more than a year. But recently, I was looking for a quick and easy contest to enter and I found a bunch of good ones…but they all involved online voting. I’ve noticed that vote-based contests seem to be run more fairly than they used to be so I figured maybe I should give these type of contests another shot.  Long story short, I created a (personal) record of 3 contest entries in one week. Obviously I’m hoping to win any or all of these contests but they also provide a great opportunity for me to showcase three, very different ways to run a vote-based video contest.  I’m going to list all 3 of my entries below. If you like them, please vote for them!

CONTEST #1: Spendster Second Chance contest.

This is actually one of the best voting systems I have ever seen. Contestants were supposed to create a video in which they talked about something they regretted buying. This contest remembers your IP address so you can only vote once every 24 hours. You don’t need to sign in or register or anything. You just follow the link and click the VOTE FOR ME button. It couldn’t be easier. Why not try it out for yourself?  Here’s my entry:  http://secondchance.spendster.org/profile/7aa6edf4483aaf5538aa9f43b7800ee316ed298b One guy seems to have figured out how to cheat in this contest but I’m just hoping for a runner-up prize.  There are ways you can fake your IP address but doing something like that seems like hard-core cheating to me.  So I won’t even explain how it’s done.  I’m sure that’s what the guy in first place is doing though.  Jerk.

CONTEST #2: DUNKIN DONUTS ULTIMATE COFFEE FAN

This is another excellent voting system. To vote you have to be a member of facebook. Oh, and votes only account for 20% of the score so this isn’t exactly a vote-based contest. But anyway, I’ve seen a few of these facebook-run contests before and they work really well. Creating fake facebook accounts would be hella time-consuming. It’s much easier just to try and get all of your friends on facebook to vote for you.

The prize in this contest is a freaking trip to Costa Rica! I’d love to win this one so if you’re a member of facebook, just follow this link, make sure you’re signed in and then click the VOTE button. Again, super easy and you can vote once a day: http://apps.facebook.com/ddbiggestfan/contests/59565/voteable_entries/9724736?ogn=facebook

So what conclusion have I reached in this little experiment?  Well any video contest that runs its votes via facebook is worth entering because cheating is pretty hard to pull off.  Creating multiple facebook pages would just take way too much time.  Contests that record your IP address are also pretty good since your friends and family won’t need to sign up to register for you.  But beware, there will always be at least on unscrupulous person willing to abuse their knowledge of computers and cheat.  Finally, video contests run on youtube are just total and complete clusterfucks.  I’ll never enter a youtube-based contest again. Avoid them.

Thanks for the votes and support folks! If you ever need votes in a contest, you’ve got mine. Just send the info to videocontestnews@gmail.com.  If you’re entry is especially awesome I may even post it here on the blog.

Last fall, I found a contest sponsored by Fed-Ex called the “Why I need a bailout” video contest. Apparently, Fed-ex’s rival, UPS was lobbying for a bailout and the contest was designed to mock them. Fed-ex even built a whole website dedicated to making fun of “The Brown Bailout.“  The concept for the site and the video contest was harsh and kinda mean-spirited…so I knew I had to enter. The idea was that you were supposed to explain why you needed a bailout and Fed-Ex would give 5 people a thousand bucks each. Plus, every finalist would get 100 bucks!

Normally I don’t enter contests with such a low top prizes but since there were 5 prizes up for grabs and I figured it’d be worth a few hours of my time. So I wrote, shot and submitted what turned out to be a really good entry. But I had been a little too eager to enter this one. I read the rules after I submitted and realized I probably had just wasted my time….

The 5 winners were to be determined by a public vote.

Crap. Fed-ex was supposed to pick 10 to 30 finalists and the public would vote for their favorites. Turns out they only got like 30 entries and so everyone got to be a finalist. All humility aside, my entry was easily the best. Hands down, all the way, the best. I sent out links to friends and tried to get some votes. But immediately I noticed that the scores of certain videos were surging upwards. To vote, you had to enter your name and some other info, fill in a CAPTCHA and the hit the “VOTE” button. But I, and about 10 of the other finalists quickly realized that if you cleared your web browser’s history and then refreshed the page, you could vote again and again and again. And here’s the most outrageous part…the contest’s rules in no way forbid voting for yourself as many times as you wanted! In fact, the rules actually said You can vote for your favorite video as many times as you want!! A free-for-all was inevitable.

yuck.

After a few days of trying to get votes, I gave up. All I could do was watch in amazement as some of the other contestants added hundreds of votes to their scores a day. In the end, the top 5 winners had thousands of votes. (and some of the losing videos had fewer than 50!) Going at a steady pace, re-peat voters were probably able to post 5 votes a minute which means they spent dozens of hours voting for themselves over and over and over. It was interesting to see some of them give up one at a time. Certain videos would get hundreds of new votes a day and then suddenly, their vote counts stopped going up. The 10-way race went down to a 9-way, then a 8-way, then a 7-way race. The people I felt sorry for were the ones that voted for themselves more than a thousand times but could never catch up to the people who eventually made the top 5.

It was obvious to anyone who looked at the contest site that the winners had cheated (well, technically they hadn’t “cheated” since re-voting wasn’t against the rules but it certainly looked like cheating) I tried to contact Fed-ex and got no response. I got an e-mail announcing the winners and that was it. But the winners were so embarrassing (seriously, some of them were like cell phone quality videos shot in dark rooms) and the cheating was so flagrant that Fed-Ex pretended like the whole thing never happened. They removed all the videos, hid the contest page and didn’t even mention the results on the “Brown Bailout” blog (they had been hyping the contest there for weeks.)  All links to the contest page had been removed from the site but I had bookmarked it.  They did list the winners but…and this blows my mind, there is no way to actually watch the winning videos.  What kind of video contest doesn’t even give links to the winning videos??  A really crappy one, that’s what kind.

On the bright side, at least they did send me my 100 bucks for making the finals.

A few weeks back I saw a listing for BlueBerry Muffin Tops’s “Blast of Blueberry” video contest and thought about entering for about half a minute. But then I saw in the rules that the sponsor would pick some finalists and then the “public” would vote for the winner…and that winner would only get a $1,500 prize. The logistics of that contest flashed me back to that sad, Fed-Ex “Brown Bailout” contest. That one sucked so much that I was too embarrassed to even write about it here when it went down. With those dark memories fresh in my head, I back-paged away as quickly as I could from the Blueberry Muffin Top site and thought to myself “I sure feel bad for the suckers who are going to enter that contest.”

Turns out, one of the suckers who entered that contest is a fan of VCN! A reader named Matt wrote me and explained he had made it to the “BBMT” finals. His entry is definitely one of the best and I voted for it. You can too by clicking here:

http://blueberrymuffintops.malt-o-meal.com/videos/

You have to register to vote of course. Matt’s entry is the one that has the thumbnail of a test subject talking to a scientist.  Here’s a direct link:  Matt’s Video.

Matt’s certainly going to have a tough time winning this one. If you’ve ever entered a vote-based video contest you know that money makes people go fucking apeshit crazy. Sure, $1,500 is a lot but some contestants will spend dozens and dozens of hours registering and voting, registering and voting, registering and voting just so they can win a little cash.

I’ve entered a few vote-based video contests over the years but Fed-Ex’s Brown Bailout contest was the last straw for me. After that one ended, I decided never again to enter a contest where the winners were picked solely by “public vote.” Really, it just isn’t worth the effort to pester my family and friends to vote for my video if some jerks are just going to sit at their computer all day and vote for themselves over and over. So heed my warnings; if a contest is letting the public pick it’s winner, DO NOT ENTER.

Imagine this scenario: You’re a finalist in the Butterfinger video contest.  You now have a one in four chance of winning ten thousand dollars. All you have to do to get the money is to get the most votes in the competition. To vote for videos on the butterfinger site, all you have to do is open a yahoo account. Now, imagine that you are just 200 or so votes away from winning the ten grand. How tempted would you be to take a day off work and do nothing but register and vote for your own video all day long?

Voting ended yesterday in the “Nobody’s gonna lay a finger on my Butterfinger” video contest and even though the vote counts of all the finalists are right there on the website for the world to see, no winner has been announced yet. The Butterfinger site says they are “tallying” the votes and a winner will be announced on October 1st.

What the heck is there to tally? The winner of the contest was supposed to be determined by a public vote. The votes are in and one video clearly has the most votes. Here’s the final results of the butterfinger contest:

I have a feeling that by “tallying” Butterfinger really means “checking for vote fraud.” I’ve been checking in on the voting in the last few days and it seemed really suspicious. Why did 2 videos peak at 9210 and 8046 votes while two other videos both made it past 12,000 votes? Is it because they are way more hilarious than the other videos? Not really. All four videos are pretty much equal in quality though I guess my personal choice would be “Robochop.” But according to the votes, the winning video is Butterfinger Phone App by David Markus.

First place. Prize: $10,000

As I said, I kept checking on the voting during the final days. As it got down to the wire, the number of votes coming in really seemed to jump. The top 2 videos were gaining hundreds of votes a day. Was some kind of advertising done to draw more people to the butterfinger site in the last days of the contest? Or maybe the people who made those top 2 videos remembered they had hundreds of friends and family members they hadn’t asked to vote yet?

During the final two days of the contest, the vote counts of the top two videos both were going up so steadily that it did seem like maybe 2 people (or two teams of people) were racing each other to the finish line.  Maybe the reason the bottom two videos didn’t make it past 10,000 votes is because the people who made them saw that something fishy was going on and decided not to even bother after a certain point.  So in the end, the “winner” was whoever had the willpower to crank out the most votes for themselves.  This kind of vote fraud would be easy to prove if yahoo kept tabs of the IP addresses where the votes came from. I guess we’ll find out if they did that if they final scores have been adjusted when the winner is announced on October 1st.