On behalf of our local music group I recently submitted a grant proposal that required work samples, such as a clip from the applicant’s musical performance. In order to meet the strict guidelines (nothing over 3 minutes), we made an edited clip lasting exactly 3 minutes. It’s posted on YouTube but it’s unlisted. As I understand it, that means that no one who doesn’t have the direct link (in other words, the proposal evaluators) can access it. Literally NO ONE has the link except me and anyone who has the proposal with the link embedded in it.
There is a six-month waiting period between proposal submission and receiving funding decisions, so I’ve been looking for ways to suss out whether we are in the running or not. I figured that looking to see if there are increasing views of the submitted work sample might give a hint: more views means that reviewers have been watching.
I hope I’m right, because the number of views has been gradually creeping up, from none to 9 to 20.
Can I interpret this as meaning that humans have looked? Or are there web crawlers/bots that cruise through everything, even unlisted uploads, and get counted as views?
Or is my question utter nonsense? I’m clueless, as you can tell.
You should be fine. I have many unlisted videos, such as musical accompaniment my wife and I provide for the choir at church. Those typically have 3 or 4 views, causing me to be annoyed that we went through the trouble to help them and they didn’t view.
They aren’t crawling your unlisted videos.
Now, if the link is posted somewhere all bets are off.
Same. My YouTube unlisted videos usually have somewhere between 0 and single-digit views.
It’s very unlikely for a bot to randomly guess an unlisted video. There are more than 70 quintillion (70 million trillion) possible IDs to guess from. See this video:
Ulp … so I guess we haven’t been eliminated from consideration yet. That’s very heartening. I don’t actually think we’ll get the grant, but it’s nice to think that they are taking our application seriously. (I’m going to tell myself that, anyway!)
For what it’s worth, the grantmakers I’ve known (both as coworkers and grant-seeker) were all very nice and quite dedicated to their work. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t take your application seriously!
(edit: typo, meant grantmakers and not grantwriters)
If the video is in a playlist, anyone with access to that playlist can find it.
I would guess that the reviewers create a playlist with all the submissions in it for ease of review. Go to your video, click the “Analytics” button then the “Reach” tab. You should be able to see if it is part of a playlist, and maybe get an idea where the viewers are from.
If it is in a playlist, it’s possible that other submitters found it this way and are checking out the competition.
Thanks, that’s a cool approach, and I would not have thought of that. I just checked - under playlists, it says, “not enough traffic data to show this report.” There also isn’t any geographic data, which is too bad as that would be enlightening.
There is a chart for “how viewers found this video.” 90% is “direct or unknown” and 10% is “external.” Whatever that means!
I know when I would put up unlisted videos, I’d go to the video’s page, it would start auto playing, and then that’s another view. So it might just be you checking on it.