May 2008

Following on from yesterdays post about StartYourTube.com, today has been an almost continuous downward spiral. In the last 24 hours, I’ve had:

• 5 hours downtime
• All the members who signed up yesterday have disappeared
• All media uploaded since yesterday has disappeared
• Worst of all, media now getting uploaded is being replaced with, well, let’s just say it’s not the correct subject matter!

The second and third points suggest they rolled back. Nice of them to let their customers know.

The final point tends to suggest they’ve been hacked, big time.

So, come on guys, spill the beans. Obviously things have gone horribly wrong, so be honest and let us know and then you can reassure us it won’t happen again.

If you want to follow the problems in near real-time, visit the forum I’ve created specifically for this purpose.

I’m starting to regret my investment…

Hooray - a non-Google post!

I like StartYourTube. In case you’ve not heard of them, they’re a “Do it yourself YouTube”. I like them so much, I signed up with them and created FlightSimTube (yes, another shameless plug but, hey, it’s my blog) and it’s doing rather well.

You can sign up for free and you can even keep some of the earnings from advertising. By default, 60% of the time your own ads are shown and 40% of the time, their ads are shown. For a fee (starting at $9.99 per month), 100% of the ads shown are yours, in addition to you getting additional video storage and bandwidth.

What I don’t like about them is there almost complete lack of communication.

I’ve had a few issues with the service over the 4 weeks or so I’ve been using it. On each occassion, I’ve contacted their “support” and, in all but one case, had no response whatsoever.

Now, for a free service, you could argue that you’re getting what you paid for, i.e. nothing. However, I’ve upgraded my account with them, so I’m now a paying customer and I expect some customer service.

Downtime is explained to customers by way of simply ignoring it. Downtime has decreased over the last couple of weeks, although, ironically, after a week of virtually no downtime, exactly 5 minutes after I spent a not inconsiderable sum on advertising for the site, it went down for 2 hours. A message to support was met with, as usual, no response whatsoever.

Guys, this is simply unacceptable. I’ve gone to the effort of creating a forum so we can at least try and help each other if the owners of StartYourTube aren’t prepared to. If you’ve had any issues, why not come along and share them.

Anyway, what’s the headline about? I received a rare email from them yesterday stating simply “We need a new domain name” and a link to a survey where you could select one of 2 possible domain names, both of which were so bad I’ve forgotten them already. So, why the change? I can only assume the YouTube lawyers have been on to them about the name, although an explanation would’ve been nice.

I still like the service. They make it dead easy to set up your own dedicated video site which is pretty feature rich (although it desperately needs a “send a message to all members option” - I shouldn’t have to download all their details, then extract their email addresses and manually send them a message). They’ve had some downtime, and they’ve made some mistakes (like deleting all my existing categories, forcing me to recreate them and getting all my existing users to re-tag their videos), but I’m hoping these are all just teething problems and will improve over time.

But, they do need to start talking to their customers, otherwise they will start to look elsewhere.

I’ve just noticed that my last 4 posts (well, five if you count this one!) have been about Google products!

It’s not deliberate, I promise

Google has just announced that Google Sites has now gone public.

I’ve had a quick play, and it actually looks pretty good. It’s basically a Wiki system, but with nice user friendly editing capabilities.

I’ve knocked up a very quick site here - basic stuff at the moment, but it did indicate how very easy it was to create something from scratch with no real effort.

I can see this being pretty popular. Wiki’s are everywhere, but they’ve (on the whole) never been that easy for non-techies to update. Google Sites makes it easy for everyone. If you’ve ever used Microsoft Word, or Google Docs, you’ll be right at home here.

I’ve been using Google AdManager to run a couple of ad campaigns on two of my sites and I’m pretty impressed with it. See my earlier post for a quick “how to” to get you started.

One thing I really like is when you add multiple “line items” i.e. the ads themselves, to an order. For example, I’ve got a 728×90 slot on one site, to which I’ve added a dozen or so individual ads which get shown in rotation on the slot.

The clever trick is that AdManager monitors which ones get clicked the most and then gives them preference. So, if ad A gets, say, 20 clicks and the others get 5 over the same time period, it’ll automatically start showing ad A more often, as it knows it’s more popular.

The more I use AdManager, the more I like it. I still find navigating around a little confusing, but it’s getting easier as I become familiar with it.

I’m currently also using OIO Publisher on one of my sites (again, see this earlier post for more details), but I’m starting to think AdManager might be a better alternative for me. One major reason is that the single block of ads I’ve created with OIO Publisher uses a whopping 8% of my total GPU usage (that’s 8% of the total GPU for about 10 sites!), which is a hell of a big performance hit.