[Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

[Victor Grigas]

On Jul 17, 2013, at 6:50 AM, Bence Damokos <bdamokos at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 7:52 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz at twkozlowski.net
>> wrote:
> 
>> However, as you correctly write, that banner only served those millions of
>> our viewers a cached image that was uploaded to donate.wm.org (so it was
>> cached the usual way) and /only/ if they had clicked the play button were
>> they served the full video. I'm no specialist when it comes to server
>> loads, but if YouTube does not lie to me, that particular video was viewed
>> only 78,000 times, which does not seem that much.
> 
> As far as I understand, YouTube does not count views when the video is
> played automatically (as happened in the banner when a person clicked on
> the placeholder image), so the actual view count is probably quite higher.
> (Don't know if  Wikimedia servers would have been able to handle it at the
> time.)
> 

This requires an explanation- so this particular banner was live for (If memory serves) three or four days in 5 mostly English-speaking countries only. This was because much of the material surrounding the video was written in English, and there was a lot of it, so translation would have been slow, expensive and prone to error.

Also, auto play of video was something totally out of the question, even if it was from commons. We didn't want users to load a Wikipedia page to have video (and audio) start playing without them clicking it. I wouldn't want that myself.

So, we did not have a video that auto-played, but none of us knew at the time that the view counter on YouTube would be inaccurate. We learned that YouTube does not count views from embedded videos on external sites. (The actual view count for that video is more like around half a million views.) 


> Best regards,
> Bence
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