Should you use video to promote your mobile app?

 

There is a lot of material on the Internet explaining the benefits of video for promoting anything, including mobile applications. At first glance this is logical.

Videos attract more attention than text or images. However, the reality is not so rosy.

I created a modified version of the R Mahjong application that allows AI bots to play against each other and records videos of the games played.

Everything seems to be fine. Just record 300 videos and post them on YouTube. However, I immediately have a question: will anyone watch this? Even if the AI played stronger than the strongest mahjong player, no one would watch it. Well, perhaps a strong professional will watch a couple of videos to see if there is anything interesting in them for him. How many such people are there? Several people.

However, this is not even the real problem.

The problem is that no one will watch even very interesting videos, because these videos are practically invisible.

What does “the video clip is practically invisible” mean? Let me show you.

A small digression.

Setting the game speed to maximum will make the video more attractive.

In this case, one game lasts approximately one minute.

Nothing is clear, but it's fun.

Okay, I've uploaded 300 videos to YouTube.

Yes, I really did. manually.

The Youtube API is of little use for this purpose, as it allows you to upload about 6 videos per day.

We published one short video:

 

which received 21 views. It doesn't look that bad.

However, the next day I tried to search for this video using the word "麻雀" on YouTube, but was unsuccessful.

Well, never mind, let's publish a long video

Then I searched YouTube for "麻雀" and selected [UPLOAD DATE Last hour]. I was able to find the video I posted among the videos uploaded to YouTube.

However, an hour later I selected [UPLOAD DATE Today] and found nothing.

Apparently, there are too many videos uploaded on the topic of "麻雀", which is why our video is missing from the search results.

Therefore, our video only has 1 hour to gain popularity (views).

Therefore, I came to the conclusion that free promotion of the channel is impossible.

For paid advertising companies, it is unknown how many views it takes for a video to remain on [UPLOAD DATE Today].

A reasonable estimate of the number of views needed is more views than the least popular channel whose video is still showing up on [UPLOAD DATE Today].

But this is just a hypothesis.

In addition, you must remember that the channel is not needed in itself, but to promote the application.

In general, I’ll leave this idea of using video for promotion for now.