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Posts Tagged ‘watch’

Guest Post: Watch Out, It’s Dot TV

What is "Dot TV"? I actually have no idea

Beardy’s Note:  For the first time ever, VCN is presenting a guest post that was written by an author who would prefer to remain anonymous.  Here’s how this article came to be:  A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a filmmaker and long-time reader of VCN that was having problem’s with .tv’s “Watch Dot TV” video contest.  The filmmaker had made the finals in the contest and he had a shot at winning the $10,000 grand prize.  The winner of of the contest was supposed to be determined  by facebook votes.  But right away, the voting seemed pretty fishy.  I’ll let our anonymous author tell the rest of the story but as you can probably guess, it doesn’t end well.  Initially I planned to do an article about this debacle myself but I knew the filmmaker could tell his own story better than I ever could.  This contest got pretty ugly and the filmmaker got screwed by the sponsors pretty badly so I suggested that we run this article without revealing the filmmaker’s name.

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In the wild west of online video contests, Watch Dot TV, a part of the large Verisign corporation, has set a new low in taking advantage of its contestants. In October they solicited entries and their judges chose the top 10 videos who competed for public votes.   First Prize was $10,000, Second Prize was a Canon 7Dand Third Prize was a Panasonic GH2.

The voting in this contest ended more than a month ago and Dot TV is now over a week late announcing the winners.  They have not issued a single statement despite the plethora of agitated comments on their . Watch Dot Tv’s continued silence is the loudest admission of guilt they could make. They even went so far as to delete people’s comments on their wall demanding accountability.

So what happened?

During the voting, each Facebook user was allowed one vote per day and after 4 days the top two entries had around 500 votes. Within hours the top two increased their lead on the third place by almost double what it took them days to accumulate. After this anomaly I discovered how the top two entries had gotten a huge lead: They exploited an error in the voting system that allowed for more than one vote a day.

Simply opening the voting page in a new tab, or even refreshing the page would allow for multiple votes. I immediately emailed the contest administrator to make them aware of the voting system error and that it has already been taken advantage of by the top two entries.

They responded and said they could not recreate this simple error on their own.

This was the major red flag. I was not trying to explain the error to an Amish craftsman, this was an internet company that could not open their own Facebook page in a new tab and recreate the error.

The two entries had already gained an insurmountable lead and the contest administrator was turning a blind eye. My fear was that they would find and fix the error I made them aware of and then deny it ever existed, meanwhile the two entries would continue to win, and Watch Dot TV would have averted a PR headache.

That’s when I decided to expose the error by voting repeatedly so it could not be ignored and brushed under the rug. As soon as I gained a lead on two winning entries, within minutes, they began exploiting the error to regain their lead. I called in reinforcements to gain such a lead that the two entries would give up, be exposed as exploiting the error, and Watch Dot TV would have to restart the competition. I did gain a 1,000 vote lead and the two entries did stop trying to keep up, so now it was just up to Watch Dot TV to fix the error and restart the competition.

Watch Dot TV’s solution was to reset the number of votes to a previous point in time that the two entries had already gained their lead by exploiting the error. When I commented on Watch Dot TV’s Facebook wall that they did not reset the votes to a point in time before the error occurred, they deleted my comment. Red flag number two.

Dot TV's facebook announcement

I continued to email them the timestamped screenshots I had taken when I exposed the voting error and asked them to address their mistake. There was only a few days left of voting for Watch Dot TV to fix this.

Watch Dot TV didn’t enjoy being called to account. After my pleas in emails and on their Facebook wall to restart the voting, they disqualified me and another entry from the contest. (Beardy’s Note:  For some mysterious reason, the sponsors did not disqualify the two original elleged cheaters.  It seems they only disqualified people who tried to beat those two contestants at their own game.)  The entry in first place remained in that position until the end of the voting period. He was even promising to donate 25% of the prize to the Invisible Children organization in an effort to gain more votes.

There were even people on his facebook wall claiming they were using multiple accounts to vote for his entry. His video also violated the contest’s Official Rules and should have never been chosen as a finalist. His entire video was created by using previously published work, a direct violation of the rules.

I have never seen such disrespectful behavior by a company towards people from which it solicited video entries.

To this day the winner has not been announced and Watch Dot Tv has not issued any statements. (Beardy’s Note:  The entire contest and all the entries have actually been removed from Dot TV’s facebook page)  My only hope is that if they did give the prize money to entry that remained in first, despite having exploited the voting error and violating the official rules, maybe 100% of his prize found its way to the Invisible Children organization.

Watch Dot TV should be ashamed of the unprofessional manner in which it operated the contest and its parent company Verisign should exercise it’s parental responsibilities and put its misbehaved child in permanent timeout.

 

—  Written by: Anonymous. To learn more about the Invisible Children fund, head here  —

 

How to get unlimited, real youtube views

Youtube: Where all your viral dreams come true

Every once and a while I will come across a “viral” video contest where the winner is determined by youtube views.  And when I do see a contest like that it takes a lot of will power for me NOT to enter.  You see, in my time running this website I have learned a lot of shady tricks; and “how to get to get tons of fake youtube views” is one of those tricks.  Basically if you go to the right website you can order all the views you want.  But those “views” are just fake, junk views.  They’re just generated by some guy in India using a computer that is constantly changing its IP address. (or something like that)  They don’t come from real people.  So in most “viral” contests, buying fake views would be considered cheating.  If you buy fake views, there is a chance you could get caught because fake views leave evidence behind.  And not only could you get disqualified from the contest you’re in, you could be kicked off of youtube for violating the site’s Terms of Service.

So like I said, I try not to enter “viral” video contests.  But about two months ago I came across a contest that was being run by a new micro-jobs website that I just had to enter.  The competition was being run in two stages.  In the first stage, people were supposed to create funny videos about giraffes (The website’s mascot is a giraffe) and then try to get as many youtube views as they could in four weeks.  The people who created the Top 5, most viewed submissions got to go on to round two where they would compete for $15,000.  I decided to enter but I promised myself I would NOT buy fake youtube views.  ()  I figured that with the resources I have at my disposal I could get into the Top 5, fair and square.  This website just keeps getting more and more traffic so I stuck a banner ad for my own video at the top of this page.  And man, did that get me a lot of views!  Plus, I have a kind of popular youtube channel with a few thousand subscribers.  So I was able to get a good chunk of views from there too.

But inevitably, as the view count deadline approached, the cheating began.  Several other contestants started buying fake views and I was pushed out of the Top 5.  I contacted the contest organizers and I explained how you could tell when someone’s view count was phony.  But they said they really couldn’t do anything about it because the practice wasn’t actually against the rules.  (So technically, it wasn’t even cheating!)  So basically I recived the OK from the contest organizers to do whatever I could to get in the Top 5.  But I still didn’t want to take the easy way out.  So I started looking for a legitimate solution to my problem.

And I found that solution in like five minutes.  It turns out that any youtube user can now sign up for the site’s “” program.  Basically you can now buy views from youtube!  Except unlike the other views you can buy, these are REAL views that come from REAL people.  If you use youtube’s promotions program to get 10,000 views, it means that 10,000 different people actually watched your video.  So while some might consider this bending the rules of a viral video contest, no one could claim that you’re breaking the rules since your views are coming from real people and since you’re not violating youtube’s terms of service.

Here’s how the program works:  After you sign up you pick which video you want to promote.  Then you tell youtube how much you are willing to pay per view.  I think I went with 12 cents but you can go even lower.  And remember, that is the most you are willing to pay per view.  You then get to select the keywords you want associated with your video.  So if your video has a giraffe in it (like mine did) you can select “giraffe” as a keyword.  Then when someone searches for giraffe videos on youtube, your video will appear in the “Promoted Videos” sidebar.  The more specialized a keyword is, the more you will pay per-click.  Here’s a a screengrab of my Promoted Videos Dashboard that shows the keywords I used for my giraffe video:

Note: I cut out the irrelevant parts of this chart in photoshop

So even though I “bid” 12 cents per view, most of my views only cost me 2 or 3 cents.  And as you can see, the keyword “funny” was the most popular keyword by a long shot.

After you set your keywords, you tell youtube how much you want to spend every day promoting your videos.  If you say “$5.00″ youtube will run your video as an ad all day until you have spent $5.00.  I think the best thing about this program is how fast the process is.  If you want a huge number of views right away, you can tell youtube you want to spend $200 a day.  Youtube will pimp your video like crazy and by end of the day, you’ll have thousands of real views.  Here’s what your “dashboard” will look like once your “campaign” is up and running:

Again, this was photo-shopped to save space

The final view count for my giraffe entry was about 16,000.  And that was enough to get me into the finals.  As you can see, I recived 10,659 views thanks to youtube’s promoted video program.  And that means I was able to get 6,000 views on my own.  And that’s pretty damn good!  If the other contestants hadn’t bought fake views, I would have been able to get in the Top 5 without any help from youtube.

So youtube’s Promoted Videos program is pretty much just a giant, view-creating machine.  However many views you want, you can get.  And you only get charged when someone actually clicks on your video.  But there is one major drawback to this program; this s&%# ain’t cheap.  I spent about $300 to get those 10,000 views.  So was it a wise purchase?  Well, the results of the contest I was will be officially announced on November 1st so check back here on Monday to see how I did.

UPDATE: The sponsored decided to split the prize 3-ways so I won $5,000. That means my investment paid off big time. But one of the other winners just happened to be the biggest cheater in the view-count round. So it was awesome to win $5,000 but I’m annoyed that a cheater got a slice of the grand prize.
 


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