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.
