The Ultimate Guide to Creating Online Video Content That Works, Part 1

And one of the potentially more valuable sources of information is the direct, immediate, and regular feedback viewers can now give in the online environment. "We’ve always traditionally done lots of surveys and continue to do them, but now with commenting on websites we’re able to create feedback loops that are very open and present which allows for a much more ongoing dialogue with your audience," says CondeNet’s Glosser. "For a site like Wired.com the audience is very vocal, either by topic or anything about the site that they like or don’t like. You just have to embrace it and listen."

"We’re frequently asking people to take advantage of these interactive aspects, asking them to email or text message in and using that as a metric for how engaged the audience is," says Zehr. "You’ve got to know there’s an audience out there that’s more likely to respond and engage."

The downside of an engaged online audience is that just because you’re getting feedback doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be helpful. "I gotta love the guy who woke up one morning and decided that he wanted to defecate in my mouth," recounted Kevin Nalty, a top YouTube producer known as Nalts. Critical comments that can be more destructive than constructive are prevalent, he says.

"This is one of the greatest challenges for anybody in this space," he continues. "Part of the game is to stay tuned in to your audience, but it can create great emotional drama as people often get dragged into the weeds by people who are so nasty. You have to exploit the middle of the bell curve. Your fans will tell you what you want to hear, and your critics often don’t help when they attack you personally; in fact, it can really take you down a dark alley, but in the middle there lies some great stuff. Every once in a while I’ll get a viewer who’ll totally take me off my guard by pointing out a trend I’ve missed or they’ll notice where I’ve stopped doing this and started doing that when I hadn’t even noticed myself doing anything differently."

Even the big producers will admit that garnering this feedback on YouTube can be a wild experience. "I think it’s interesting how it’s different whether you’re on one of our websites and you’re looking at comments versus on YouTube where there’s a much broader audience watching Epicurious videos in our channel there than those viewers who come to Epicurious.com," says Glosser. "You are going to find the comments are not all on topic, and it’s a much more free-flowing conversation. In many ways when you’re looking at YouTube comments you’re using a different filter than on your own site."

Kipkay has experienced how different audiences on different sites provide different feedback and have different expectations because his how-to videos first appeared on Metacafe and now he’s being commissioned to produce videos for MAKE magazine and Instructables.com. "On MAKE and Instructables.com the viewers are there specifically to make junk so they’re going to be a little more critical of the project if I don’t show something or if they think there’s a better way to do something or if I didn’t explain something quite right," he says. "I don’t get the childish critiques that I do on Metacafe, which reaches a more diffuse audience."

These thoughts are perhaps summed up most concisely by Revision3’s Louderback: "You can’t fall prey to the tyranny of the minority. You have to reach for the truth inside the comments."

It’s often assumed that the major media companies have not yet learned how to engage their audiences online to be able to get this kind of effective feedback, but at least for MTV, that’s definitely not the case.

"All of our sites have comments and areas where people can tell us what they think, and by the way they do," says Clayman. "What’s interesting is that because you have people who are really engaged in shows and programming, they spend a lot of time on our sites sharing their thoughts about the programming, about the shows, about the characters. A lot of it is people saying, ‘I hope they kick this person out of the house on Real World,' but those who are engaged and feel their voices are being heard provide quality feedback," he says. "We definitely listen to it."

Only by listening to your audience can you know what’s working and what they want to see. By interacting with them, you can establish a personal connection that can help drive viewership, according to Nalts. "I’ve seen a lot of good creators do good content but never quite develop an audience," he says. "Then all of a sudden they start talking back and forth with the audience and they pop like crazy."