Although “Long Way to Grandma’s” has been sat dormant on YouTube for a few weeks, today was reported in the news as being the busiest day on the roads, being the end of term, and people heading to family retreats, airports, the seaside, caravan parks, etc. So, it seemed a good time to post a link to the track on Facebook. I offered the following, together with the link:

As today is supposedly the busiest day of the year on our roads, what with people all starting their summer holidays and such, I thought it would be a good day to share Long Way to Grandma’s. The track is part of a study I did into the relationship between noise and music. All the sounds in the backing track are from our VW Sharan – an idea my very clever and imaginative wife came up with. I’m sharing it via Facebook and YouTube mainly as an exercise into releasing music without a record label – something a lot of my students are looking to do. So, if you like it, do please feel free to share it with your friends and family. I am hoping it will appeal to folks who like Madness, or cars, or kids, or going on holiday, or any combination of the above. Happy end-of-term Friday, everyone.

The post has been live for nearly half an hour, and so far, only one person has shared it. This could obviously be that everyone who has seen the post does not have time to listen and watch; or it could be that they did, and thought it was crap and therefore not worth sharing. The third option, of course, is potentially a little more sinister. Is this something to do with the News Feed Algorithm?There are many thousands of variables within the algorithm, all programmed with a view to prioritising posts which will generate the most ad revenue for Zuck and his crew. Facebook is currently promoting it’s own video service, and is ‘at war’ with Youtube, fighting for domination in social video. I have noticed that there are very few YouTube videos featuring in my own newsfeed – most are hosted by Facebook, and I guess that this is the reason why.

This is all very well, until it comes to monetization. A YouTube channel can be set up quite easily to monetize videos via ad revenue. Currently, Facebook’s videos are all completely gratis. There are plans for this to change, but these are currently embryonic.

I could, of course, post the video via Facebook’s own video service, the two posts could even have a ‘race’, but in order to do this, I’d be knowingly foregoing a huge slice of potential revenue. Actually, this point is fairly meaningless if Facebook is not going to play nice with my Youtube video anyway. In truth the whole exercise is fairly meaningless if people don’t consider the work as worthy of a ‘share’!

…update… it’s been live for one hour, and there are now 2 ‘likes’ and 3 ‘shares’. I’ll check back at the end of the day.