Hacker News Reader

Comment by awjr | Hacker News Reader

Why do this? Why have a page with nothing on but an embedded youtube video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0...

Somebody please explain to me what benefit this site gets from this?

View on HN

They get people linking to their page instead of the underlying YouTube video, hence better pagerank.

They get people visiting their page instead of just YouTube, and some of them reading other bits of their blog, hence more visibility for other stuff they want people to read.

They get their brand associated with Bill Gates doing cool philanthropic stuff.

The more difficult question is what benefit Hacker News gets from a link that goes there rather than to the underlying YouTube video. Actually, that's not a difficult question either; the answer is "no benefit".

To be totally fair, I hadn't heard of Bits & Bytes before now, so that's a little value I didn't have before. It's not quite accurate to say we get nothing out of linking to them instead of the youtube clip.

I agree with you and flagged this submission...and am kind of surprised to see it on the front page still. This is clearly blog spam. If a post is going to drive traffic with an embedded video, then at the very least, they should transcribe some of the best parts of the video for those of us who prefer reading a little about the video.

What's even more galling is that the source video is most likely a copyright violation...it was not posted by 60 Minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com