This is a post about driving YouTube referrals (traffic within YouTube) through videos that are age restricted. It also contains reference to sexuality and bodily functions, though no explicit images.

I work with Orchid Box a few days a month. Lately, we have being doing some testing on YouTube videos, especially focusing on the testing of thumbnails and according click through rates.

We were lucky enough to have an interesting - and somewhat different - client (device to help with premature climax, slightly NSFW) for whom we could test a YouTube promotion. Though YouTube is a giant of the web world and video marketing is a massive goldmine of audience potential (a recent comScore survey suggested that 87 percent of the U.S. Internet audience watched videos online), few people talk about marketing through the video platform and even fewer mention adult marketing. I convinced them to let me write it up and share it.

Background

YouTube’s very own definition on age-restricted content dictates that

"Some videos don't violate our policies, but may not be appropriate for all audiences. In these cases, minors or logged out users may not be able to view the content.”

See more on: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802167?hl=en

The types of videos are fairly obvious: medical content with graphic images, violent or obscene content and other such content all falls under this bracket. Sometimes, as with our client's instructional video, it's simply unavoidable, but we can play this to our advantage.

If you want to flag a video as age restricted, you can either go through the form Google provides, or you can flag it after uploading:

The bad news for marketers is that if you are looking to monetize your video, age-restricted videos are not eligible for monetization and will also not be shown in certain sections of YouTube, so that's not really a direct option.

Age restricted videos are also invisible to all users as a default, so you need to log in and verify your age before watching any - though if you are annoyed by this process, there are other ways you can bypass this.

Age restricted ecosystem

It looks to me that AR videos are treated as a vertical niche on YouTube, so once you browse a video, you will only be recommended similar age restricted videos rather than the normal wider algorithmic video recommendations one might receive: once you are in the age-restricted ecosystem, YouTube keeps you there.

Some of these videos get a constant flow of visitors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N__s-zv8Kew (probably NSFW) Female Doctor Does Testicle Exam (Public Domain Video - Adults Only)

This seems to be a common trend across many of these videos, many of which are several years old.

So how can you join this age-restricted party and start getting tens of thousands of views on your video?

What we did

As per Google's guidelines, we flagged our own product video as age restricted- required for the adult content of the instructional video - and left YouTube's automatic thumbnail on to see how the video platform would perform self-optimising.

Within under a week we had 50,000 referrals to our video from within YouTube, and views were sky-rocketing. The majority, if not all, of these referrals came from other age restricted videos.

This traffic was coming from 11 different sources, including seven different types of sources within YouTube:

Even better for our clients than just the views was the fact that the demographics were spot on – perhaps unsurprising when you consider that once you are logged in, YouTube has a hell of a lot of detail about your age, gender and interests. That's only going to get better with the Google+ integration too.

We were surprised to see such volume coming from mobile, perhaps this is simply reflective of the growing importance of mobile traffic for video marketing:

We were also amazed to find incredibly specific Google-type searches happening directly within YouTube – many questions and queries of three words and more - illustrating the selling and advertising potential of the platform as an answer to user problems.

YouTube suggested videos

When we saw this unexpected spike in traffic, aside from being at once very confused and very pleased, we analysed the sources in greater detail and found that just two specific videos were sending a huge number of views.

Why were they sending such a high number? Well, our video thumbnail was ranked third on the suggested video feature that pops up after you've finished watching a video.

(Images obviously blurred!)

The video The Study of the Human Penis has amassed just over 1.5 million views on YouTube, the video What Happens During Sex has 220,000 – both videos are hubs of traffic that we tapped into just a small amount, but in terms of a brand new video on YouTube it brought significant traffic.

Given the numbers, this would suggest that for a rank three in the thumbnail section you might look at getting between 1 and 5% referral traffic for any related videos. But obviously we want to maximise that percentage, and a major factor in doing that is through the video thumbnail.

Experiment on Thumbnail

Having enjoyed a great referral rate from our related videos with our automatic thumbnail – a video mid-demonstration which could be seen as explicit at first glance – we decided to change the image in the thumbnail of the YouTube ad to try and increase the brand visibility.

We changed from this explicit picture to the company logo that introduces the video. It didn't go too well:

This change in thumbnail image accounted for a massive drop in CTR and YouTube dropped the video further down the suggested videos list as a result, meaning our video went nearly 1,000 views a day to around 50. The effect was almost instantaneous, dropping within just a couple of days.

Changing the thumbnail can only be done if your Youtube account is verified, which requires that they call you and you then enter a code on the site.

Suddenly our video dropped right down in the rankings of post-video and in the sidebar down the side. Now we were in 12^th position, and receiving next-to-no clicks at all:

So are we crazy to leave it like this?

At the end of the day, we had to maintain a balance between the numbers and the brand associated: we changed our thumbnail to make the site look more professional so as not to surprise people with a penis image straight away. No one needs that on a Monday morning.

We also found that the YouTube traffic never actually drove any traffic, and most certainly didn't drive any sales of the product. In fact, most of the views were from countries where the device was not sold, particularly in the US, and therefore the real benefit for the client was minimal.

I suggest that if you want to try this out, you make a second video to be able to play more with YouTube marketing. This separate YouTube video to the one on your website will give you more flexibility with experimenting.