At the time of this post, the video of us meeting Snow White at our Walt Disney World Princess Breakfast is currently hovering at 1,959 visits. While I have monetized several of my YouTube videos, this is the only one that is really actively searched (and then viewed). I am going to track its progress to see how it does and report on what works and what doesn’t (pre-roll ads vs in-video, linking on other sites, etc.).
Originally, the video was using this thumbnail:
And the title was, “Sophia the First Meets Cinderella at Walt Disney World Princess Breakfast“.

On November 10th 2014 it was changed to, “Disney Princess Breakfast: Sophia the First meets Snow White“, and also got its current thumbnail – an image taken by my wife Beth. Before then it was an image auto-generated by YouTube. I was reluctant to use an image other than what YouTube selected, because in my opinion the person clicking on the video should see a depiction of what is really going to be in the video. However for this project, I want to see what customizations help (or hurt) the progression of views for the video. Ultimately, I want the Sophia / Princes Breakfast Video to become the number one viewed video for people searching “Disney Princess Breakfast”.
Next up: Closed Captioning
Sometime this month (In between work, kids, and Christmas shopping), I will transcribe the audio track in the Princess Breakfast video. YouTube offers an Automatic Captioning Service, but not for this particular video; am guessing because the audio was not of a good-enough quality (it is pretty muddy between the canned announcer voice-over predominantly heard in the video, and our voices) so I will be doing it by hand. Once I have that completed, I will roll out new translations one by one, to see if that appears to have an impact on views of the video.
This page has a pdf that you can download.
[…] is a followup to the “Monetizing the Princess Video” post discussing the YouTube video I posted and then monetized with Google Ads. Today, […]