Banned from YouTube

As you can see I haven't posted in quite a while.  I've been busy with writing and product development. Though I also grew tired of following Make-Money-Online product launches, with the claims growing ever more preposterous.

But I do still use what I learned from online marketing to try and help out friends who have a lot to offer the world, but know little about backlinks, linkwheels, SEO, page-rank, etc.

And so it was that I advised my friend Dannica to make a YouTube video to promote her new book.  "People LOVE videos," I said, "just make something short, fun and catchy.  Make a video that people will want to watch more than once."

"Oh, is that all," my sarcastic friend replied.

But when I saw the video she had made, I thought she had nailed it.  It was clever, fun, and only a minute long. So Dannica uploaded it to YouTube, using a curiousity arousing title of, "WHY is Dannica Dancing?" (my suggestion).  She posted the YouTube URL in her status on Facebook and sent it to a couple of our Tweeting buddies. 

Imagine her horror when she discovered a couple hours later, that when people went to that link, they didn't see her video, but instead saw:

Ouch! 

First we ran around doing damage control.  Dannica deleted the status update from Facebook, emailed the Tweeters to hush them and deleted a blog post about it.

 And then we looked at each other (okay actually we emailed this back and forth) and said, "Why?  Why would YouTube ban this video?"

 We read the terms of service and looked at the message again.

Spam?  Sure the video was promotional, but so are all the movie trailers posted on YouTube, was this any different?  We didn't see how.

Scam? I tried to make a joke of this.  Because Dannica's ebook is only 99 cents, I joked that she was really swindling people out of big bucks.  Dannica wasn't amused.

Commercially deceptive?  This was the only thing we could even imagine.  Because the video was posted with the headline, Why is Dannica Dancing and then the video doesn't really TELL you why she is dancing, could that be what was wrong?  Dannica had also included a link to the book's page in the Kindle Bookstore, so the video was on some level both 'commercial' and 'deceptive'.  Oh the shame, the shame.

 Here is the video posted on DailyMotion which doesn't seem to have.....er.... the same standards as YouTube does.

 
WHY is Dannica Dancing? by Dannica_Daniels

What do you think, dear Reader, does that seem worth a ban? 

Today we tried to load the video onto the website, BannedFromYouTube.com 

I don't think the upload was successful and secondly, I don't think folks who browse that site are looking for videos like the one Dannica made.  Holy cow, these are not videos that leave you wondering, "Now why would YouTube ban that?"  No indeed.  They were generally very graphic and pornographic -- just based on their thumbnails. No I did NOT watch any. So we ditched that site, where Dannica's dancing video looked like very out of place..

At any rate, I'm still trying to convince Dannica that there is no shame in being banned by YouTube (her whole account was banned since it was a new account) and that we could use this unfortunate event to some good, like.... I've got it, a blog post. 

Oh, but before I go, I should tell you a bit about Dannica's book.  Here it is:

 

Make Love to Your Food, Wicked New Ways for Women to Lose Weight. It's really not just a book about losing weight, it's about improving your self-esteem and getting motivated to take good care of yourself. I tried to tell Dannica she should include that concept in the book description, but she didn't act on my advice. Frankly, my guess is, after the YouTube debacle, she really isn't going to be listening to my advice. And so it goes.