My most viewed video is titled “Extreme Child Abuse”. All the traffic comes from related videos. Some of which are videos of real child abuse by parents or usually footage from nanny cams. I don’t recommend watching any of them. Child abuse is a horrible thing!
If you know me, you know that I would never abuse my children. I do, however, enjoy roughhousing with my kids. Wrestling with your kids is actually very beneficial to their development. They enjoy it and it makes them more resilient.
You might ask why I titled the video as abuse (my wife certainly has). I like to test out different titles and thumbnails to my videos to see what gets views. I had followed Shaycarl for a while and noticed that he used outrageous titles and thumbnails especially at the peak of his popularity. Shay also likes to horseplay with his kids and in one of his very early videos he used the term “Child Abuse” in the title of his video. I thought I would give it a try.
A month or two after I posted the video I started to notice the views go higher and higher. YouTube had picked the video up as a suggested video for several other high traffic videos. The views just keep going up! As of the writing of this article the video has been viewed 134,000 times!
Minnie Stubz asked me yesterday if we could make another video where we swing them around and I thought it could be a sequel to the above video which was made nearly two years ago. I labeled the video “Extreme Child Abuse (Part 2)” and sure enough it is already getting over double the views my typical new videos get in the first day.
Why do you think people want to see child abuse? Is it wrong for me to mislead people like that? I feel like I’m doing people a service. They are likely watching a lot of depressing videos before they get to mine and my hope is that it acts as a ray of hope and an example of how to play with kids and enjoy rough play. I don’t necessarily want to be associated with abuse but one of the reasons I choose to post videos to youtube is to be a positive influence on the internet to do what the Vlog Brothers refer to as decreasing world suck! If you think this will help, go “like” and “favorite” the above videos and help decrease world suck.
Leave a comment and tell me what you think. Why do we, as humans, sometimes seek negativity?
~DFTBA!
