YouTube's Product Bulletin Reveals Interesting Feature for SEO, But What is IRDB? [Reel Web #45]

On this week's Reel Web we look at additional changes and updates YouTube has posted on their Partner Product Bulletin including linking to domains, your avatar positioning, default upload settings, and YouTube's involvement on Pinterest.  In addition, we discuss Neilsen Ratings interest in monitoring your YouTube videos and results from J.D. Power's latest poll on viewer habits.

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Lotza YouTube Updates: Channel linking, Avatars, Defaults, etc...

A new feature YouTube recently launched is called the YouTube Partner Product Bulletin.  It lists all the different tweaks and updates and things that they’re changing with YouTube, along with different dates that they expect those things to go live along with behind the scenes details and things you might not otherwise be aware of but do have pretty significant implications to your videos on YouTube.

One of these changes is you can now tie your YouTube channel to a domain, so you can use your blog or website to help influence the video’s rankings in search.  YouTube highly recommends that you enable this feature for your channel by going through IRDB.  What is IRDB?  Good question ;-)  Please let us know if you know in the comments below.

Another change is to the default settings.  For example, if you have description text that you use in all the videos you post on YouTube, instead of having to copy and paste this information for every video, you can now set it in your default information.  Defaults are now available for text, tags, default categories, and monetization settings.

YouTube also announced that the avatar icon picture that you use for your channel now shows up on three new additional place, next to your organic search results, underneath your video and in one box search as well.  Now it seems like it’s more important because it shows up next to your video in organic search results.

Finally, YouTube has always been very active in social media sites and they have now become active on Pinterest, kinda (they have a whopping 11 followers).  Their board contains many different videos and categories that are of interest to their followers.

Why Do Video View Counts Stop at 301?

We found a video answering the question as to what is happening behind the scenes when the YouTube view counter gets stuck at 301.  The interview is with a YouTube Analytics Product manager who does go into a lot of detail on what is happening at their end as the video view counts increase.

YouTube to Allow Data Access to Neilsen Group

The Nielsen Group now wants access to your data on your YouTube account and provides step by step instructions on how to enable that.  Why is this important?  If you are not familiar with the Nielsen Groupings, they provide all the analytics on television ratings and advertising information.  In an attempt to try to move similar standards to online video, YouTube and Neilsen Group are working together to make this happen.  Long term this could be a big benefit to online video content and helping channels receive better advertising sponsorships, ratings and more.

Video Viewing Increases on Handheld Devices

JD Power came out with some new analysis that says that people are now watching more online video on their iPads or on their tablets then they are on their desktop computers.  They also said that the longest viewing time now comes from people who are watching on their gaming consuls.

QUESTION: Who will be the first reader to learn and share what IRDB is?  Hint, it isn't in one of the top 10 results in Google.

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