The plan for 2025 has been progressing nicely. There are three main goals. “A Book About Making Web Games” is a difficult project but at least the work has started, the Crossy Road Chicken Tournament has also started, and the Super Mario World All Exits Guide is complete. Although, did I make a mistake by scheduling the video to launch so far into the future? Was it a bad idea to schedule it for March 8, 2025? That’s the Saturday before Mario Day (MAR10). How is YouTube handling the Search Engine Optimization for “Premiere” videos?
The history…
Nintendo officially announced their next game console. Apparently, the Nintendo Switch 2 should arrive sometime in 2025. In preparation for the launch, Photics.TV has conducted a few experiments with Nintendo related content. So far, those videos have been underperforming. That suggests this is an incredibly competitive topic on YouTube.
To succeed in this category, the videos have to be really good. Yet, they are good videos. Something else is missing. There hasn’t been that breakthrough moment. That’s the question — what’s wrong? That’s why special attention was directed towards the launch of the Super Mario World video. It’s the last big Nintendo video on the channel, that last big datapoint, before the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2.
The Previous Super Mario Video
The New Super Mario Bros. Wii All Star Coins Guide! video launch was disappointing. A video that took months to create, had less views than an average Crossy Road video. It was the same story with the NES Classic Trivia Quiz. These were massive projects, which I thought people would rather enjoy. Unfortunately, these videos were surpassed by a video about a floor sweeper.
A fancy broom beat Super Mario? 😲
Learning Is Part of The YouTube Journey
The new Mario video has significant improvements, as there’s new information being applied. First, it has better captions. While super tedious, the entire script of the 90 minute video was synched. This was a problem before, as my 2018 Mac mini wasn’t strong enough to edit captions on a 3+ hour video. An hour and a half is still quite long, but more manageable than before.
Additionally, the chapters are correct. According to the testing, there’s a 100 chapter limit on YouTube videos. That limit was previously unknown. I didn’t see it mentioned in the YouTube documentation. That’s probably because creating over 100 chapters is not a common thing to do. The YouTube chapters weren’t working properly.
Proper chapters is a plus for SEO. As while the previous Mario video is not receiving an exceptional amount of views overall, it is receiving a significant amount of views from Google Search. That’s the strategy! By constantly chipping at the wall, eventually it should crumble. That breakthrough moment could occur.
That why this launch has to be right. These gigantic video projects can’t keep failing. If this new Super Mario World video fails to show improvement, perhaps it’s better to focus attention elsewhere. Not a single Nintendo video on the channel has surpassed 10,000 views. That’s a problem when a video about the Pac-Man Board Game has over 2.1 million views.
Determination is a virtue, but should that determination be directed elsewhere? Well, with the work already done, it’s important to ensure the best possible launch. That’s when I started wondering about YouTube. Is it using the right meta tags? Is YouTube telling search engines, “Hey guys, this video is launching in the future.” So, I looked at the HTML source code of the video listing.
The YouTube Source Code Is Enormous!
I was quite surprised to see so much code. It was 38524 lines! At 3.2 Megabytes, that webpage is many times larger than the original Super Mario Bros. (That’s just the HTML page, not the images or the video itself. The video was 8.37 GB when uploaded.) It was amazing to see the complexity of the HTML and JavaScript. But after scrolling a bit, I saw what I was looking for…
2728 2729 2730 2731 2732 2733 | <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2025-01-14T07:47:19-08:00">
<meta itemprop="uploadDate" content="2025-01-14T07:47:19-08:00">
<meta itemprop="genre" content="Gaming">
<span itemprop="publication" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BroadcastEvent">
<meta itemprop="isLiveBroadcast" content="True">
<meta itemprop="startDate" content="2025-03-08T13:15:00+00:00"> |
At first I was concerned, as the date of the content is from back in January. Would the search engines think that the video is old before it even launches? Hopefully not, as YouTube is using the “Broadcast Event” schema. The meta tags state that it is a live broadcast and it has the start date of March 8. Amazing!
What’s Next?!
Now all that’s left to do is wait. Hopefully the video does well. If it does, there might be a halo effect on the previous Nintendo videos. It’s been tough staying motivated, especially with all of the snow, but it’s nice to know that one of the three goals for the year has already been reached. 🙂