Seeking advice about linking to music portfolio supplements and audition videos - YouTube slaps ads on public video content that my daughter loaded. I know she can load to Vimeo or Google docs, but some of her YouTube videos have a large number of views and are connected to other videos in her account. Sometimes a video chugs along without ads, and then all of sudden ads get slapped on.
Also, her music world is all on Instagram so she is like this is not where my community goes, but the schools are asking for full videos, not snippets.
I would love to hear about your solutions for sending portfolio and audition videos.
And also, I welcome any comments about manipulating google search results. There’s the loop of people clicking into a really old video, but then the video keeps coming up because people click on it etc. Also, the instagram account of another person with her similar name keeps coming up. Do admissions people even Google students?
We are not assuming that they google the student - can’t imagine they have time? If you mark the YouTube video as private (accessible with the link only) that Should stop ads? Or as already said - just upload them directly to the schools preferred site and leave your YouTube and IG videos alone.
Thinking back, I don’t think there was one college that asked for links. All of them asked for the videos to be uploaded directly into the application. I think that is pretty much the norm. That should not be an issue.
I think it is naive to believe that colleges won’t Google your kid. I can almost guarantee they do. My son has both an active instagram and a website and I can track hits on the website with quite a bit of detail. Every time we submitted an application there were obvious increases in hits on the website. There were also increases in hits usually in the days before or after live auditions. My guess is that admissions officers commonly do a once over on most/all applicants just to verify who they are and what they are saying. But most of the hits ended up being teachers, which we later ascertained definitively in a few cases. My son was applying to top conservatories and was a strong candidate, so I don’t know how normal that is.
We did do a bit of cleaning up before submitting applications. All of his playing videos prior to high school (youtube) or that he did not feel were great were changed to unlisted. Personal instagram was made private. Website was cleaned up. On his professional Instagram, we made sure to clean up his bio so it was obvious who he was. In a few cases where others had posted videos of him that were not high level, we asked them to take them down.
I also wouldn’t assume a school won’t google your kid. I would encourage your kid to go clean up anything they wouldn’t want a college or employer to see. Or close down public accounts.
We did use youtube for some submissions. We have had a primary youtube for years to share videos with far flung relatives, etc. So we did clean up that, put some things private. But we also posted this pretty generically without full names. In my cursory search, that does not come up if I search family names.
For use with colleges (each of my kids did need a couple with links for various reasons, like I can recall a unique scholarship application through a LAC), we created a clean brand new youtube user and uploaded the videos to that. Made them private AND turned off comments. And didn’t share that channel or videos with anyone else through the audition process. So there were no additional public videos through that channel. We did opt to upload where that was possible.
Have your daughter make a music video for this purpose. If your student is a prospective music major, there will be specific criteria on the college websites regarding how to send things. I don’t think most programs accept social media links to fulfill their audition requirements.
@thumper1 I did not suggest linking to social media. Maybe I was unclear. Whatever was uploaded on the social media account- the original video- could be uploaded in an application. Absolutely not appropriate to send a link to social media videos,