Recently I applied for the YouTube Partners program. It was a long time coming, mostly because I haven't had the feeling of being worthy enough to be deemed a Partner on the site. I applied a long time ago with my old YouTube account, and looking back now it's understandable why I didn't get accepted (although at the time I thought I was the next big star...)

Anyway, I have a vlog that I've been trying to upload for three consecutive days. Each time I try, it's unsuccessful. It'll upload to about 1/3 of the progress bar, and inexplicably stop. I troubleshot through all possible causes for my file to not upload, and did the following:

• Restarted my computer four times
• Reset my wireless router
• Re-rendered my video in four other formats, aside from the .mov I always use
• Contacted seven other YouTube users, some partnered and some not, to ask if they too had been having uploading problems (which they weren't)
• Tried uploading each of those four file types, all at different times, using Safari, Firefox, and even Chrome
• Sought out and downloaded three 3rd-party applications that promised they could upload videos to YouTube. None got past 1/3 of the video uploading
  
• Used two different friends' MacBooks, and one friend's PC laptop, and tried Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on each (IE was only on the PC, of course)

I finally got so fed up that I went back to the possibility that, maybe, juuuust maybe, it was YouTube itself that wasn't working for me. I decided about a half hour ago that I would try uploading a short clip (ten seconds long, 3.7 megabytes, to be exact) and see if I got the same problem. Lo and behold, the upload wouldn't go through. I was beyond confused at this point. I started wondering if maybe my account had been suspended (to a lesser-extent than full-on inoperability), and if perhaps I had some sort of "upload-block" placed on my account.

And then I remembered my Partnership application, which I submitted back on September 22nd at 12:34AM (I know that because I sent out the following tweet: That's it. I'm going to apply for a @YouTube partnership. Oh gosh.. Here goes nothing. *crosses fingers & wonders if the cosmos are in line*)

But why is this important? Well, I remember being in TheWillOfDC's BlogTV room on the night when he topped 10,000 subscribers, and how he told his story of being accepted into the Partnership program. He said that he hadn't heard back from YouTube within two weeks, and he started to wonder what the hold-up was. Apparently KoolJeffrey informed him that, if you haven't heard back in two weeks or less, then your account is in a test-run period where they analyze all of your data to see if you're a good fit in the Partner program. At the point of writing this, my application has been in for 18 days, 3 hours, and 39 minutes. So what does THAT mean?

Not a whole heck of a lot. I know that I *may* currently be in a trial period. Emphasis on *may*. I might also be a the bottom of the pile, sitting beneath the application of the next Shane Dawson or Fred, and I haven't even been reviewed yet. I'm not going to get excited, or jinx myself, or mis-align the previously mentioned cosmos by making grossly exaggerated statements and claiming that I'm most certainly a Partner now. Not in the slightest. But perhaps this inability to upload is a test to see how well my "older" content (age is relative in this case, being that my last video was uploaded only 4 days ago) does for bringing in the views. That means that, once the freshness factor of the video wears off, and once my usual viewing audience has seen it, does it continue to be propelled out to the world, or do the view-counts drop off like a lead weight? That might be what they're charting right about now.

We shall see, I suppose. I personally may not want to jinx anything, but that little guy that lives deep, right down in the center of me in a very, very tiny cavern that nobody knows about is going to sleep tonight thinking, "Oh... I hope so..."

:)

Labels: Ideas, ObviouslyBenHughes, Partnership, thinking, Video, YouTube

Labels: Facts, Green Day, Ideas, Video, YouTube