No problem. Just truck in some more bananas and the chimps will get back to it, right? Hmm…. a couple of days later: We are experiencing data processing delays and are working to get caught up. No data has been lost. Thank you for your patience.

Well, at least no data has been lost. We lived in tense hope, our patience acknowledged! Then this: We are experiencing data processing delays. We expect to be completely caught up by Friday. No data has been lost.  Thank you for your patience.

Ok…. well at least we have a date to go by. I cancelled Friday’s scheduled pedicure and ordered a small ham to feed on while spending an entire day counting views on all the video campaigns we’re seeding at LAVA! But now … clearly the creative department at Google have run out of ideas, and we get this: We are experiencing continued data processing slowness. We’re going to try replacing the batteries. No data has been lost. Thank you for your patience.

And here I thought YouTube ran on clean coal.

UPDATE (as of 20 February 2012): It’s now been two weeks and YouTube is still having trouble with it’s analytics back-end. It seems that particularly, data for the 13th of February is missing. Perhaps the Data Liberation Front decided to take action that day! Here is YouTube’s latest warning: Analytics users: We love you. We are just going through a bit of a rough patch. The missing data for the 13th will be restored shortly. It had some irregularities so we temporarily skipped it to get you the rest of your data faster. Thank you for your continued patience.

Irregularities? Did Rebecca Black break YouTube again?

To all our clients, and any YouTube Channel Partners out there seeding your videos, and particularly for those behind on your rent, we’ll stay on top of this issue, and continue to update if we learn anything. Viral marketing has never been so exciting!

The video is currently in orbit with over 2 million views. I bet 1.8 million of these are from Canadians, thinking to themselves … why didn’t I do this?

So how do YouTube TrueView Instream ads work?

YouTubers are shown the pre-roll when watching certain videos (as determined by your targetting options), and are given the option to skip it after watching the first 5 seconds. The advertiser is only charged, however, when the user has watched at least 30 seconds.

Through the AdWords interface, YouTube provides data on how many impressions your video generated, and how many people went on to watch more than 30 seconds (or to completion if its shorter than 30 seconds). These are the views you get charged a competitive CPV for (impressions are free). It also tells you how many times someone clicked on the pre-roll. These clicks are free too! That’s right! You only get charged for the ‘view’.

So, in the example above:

• The video generated 8,405 impressions (no charge for these).
• 1,886 viewers watched at least 30 seconds of the video (you get charged for these).
• The average CPV is A$0.06 (Aussie dollars).
• 138 viewers also clicked on the pre-roll (these are free too)

But, can we get any deeper data that this? For example, how many people watched the entire TrueView pre-roll? What percentage of people watched my Instream ad to half-way? Is there a measure for what percentage of your video users watch?

Luckily, yes there is, but you need to link your AdWords account to the YouTube account which is hosting your pre-roll. Doing this is simple, and you’ll find the “Linked YouTube Accounts” link on the bottom left of your AdWords screen. Once this is done, navigate back to your campaign, and click on the Videos tab. And this is what you’ll find:

What does it mean? Well, looks like this pre-roll performed quite well. 23% of all people who saw the pre-roll were still watching a quarter of the way through the entire video, and 17% watched it half-way. 11% (or about 207 people) watched it to the end.

Note that for this 104 second video, at the quarter way mark (26 seconds), you still haven’t been charged. Not bad!

Do YouTube TrueView Instream ads work for you? Let us know in the comments.

If you’d like your playlist to play the first video automatically, there is a simple code hack to achieve this. Simply add the tag &autoplay=1 immediately after the video or playlist ID.

For example:

<iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PL970B92149F4CA454&;hl=en_US” frameborder=”0″ width=”560″ height=”315″></iframe>

becomes

<iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PL970B92149F4CA454&autoplay=1;hl=en_US” frameborder=”0″ width=”560″ height=”315″></iframe>

But beware: YouTube does not count autoplaying videos as a view. 

This is how the embedded playlists will appear:

User action required – viewer needs to click play – YouTube will count this as a view

Autoplaying Embed – Videos will autoplay – YouTub will not count this as a view

Whatever the numbers, though, a ‘Like’ is clearly worth enough for some cleverly devious programmer to develop a Facebook spamming script that seduces people to click on a salacious video, which actually results is you ‘liking’ a totally unrelated Facebook Page. This might be the reason your Facebook friends recently asked you if you really liked Sex and the City 2.

The way it works is fairly simple. You’re innocently reading your Facebook News Feed when you see that your mother has posted this:

You can’t resist the curiosity and click! You then get taken to a page with a fake video which has a layer of transparent like buttons on top of it. So as soon as you click play, instead of watching Dad walk in on Daughter, you become an unknowing Fan of a spammer’s Facebook Page.

Your only hope is that by some random cosmic coincidence, you really do like Sex and the City 2 but just forgot to express it on Facebook.

Read more about Like-Jacking here: http://research.zscaler.com/2011/06/dad-walks-in-on-daughter-embarrassing.html