Should you sign up for TopBuzz?

TopBuzz started reaching out to numerous YouTube Creators. When i received my first invitation from them i thought it was Spam. After i received my 4th or 5th Invite i got curious and started researching who TopBuzz actually is. Well it turns out TopBuzz is one of the biggest media outlets in China/Asia and they are owned by a company called ByteDance. Their company worth is estimated around 20 Billion Dollar US and if you haven’t heard they just bought Musical.ly and were also trying to acquire Reddit. So we are dealing with a huge player here. But still TopBuzz is only little known in the western parts of the world.

The Promise

TopBuzz is reaching out with very tempting promises. A huge audience, more views, more diversity for your online income and and easy to use Import feature for all your existing content. Doesn’t this all sound to good to be true? After they peaked my interest i checked out their website and at a first glance everything looks nice and polished. They state to have even more big YouTube Creators like Logan Paul on their side then they even stated in their mail.

So how does TopBuzz actually work. Their main focus is on Mobile Device users. So they are delivering you a never ending feed like you know it from Facebook and Instagram. This feed consists out of articles and videos. The Content they present to you is automatically generated with the help of their algorithm.  You can of course specify categories you are interested in and they’ll updated your feed based on the content you are watching.

How does the Import work. Actually it’s pretty easy. You just paste your Channel ID and you are good to go. When I set up my Account they said something about a verification process. As it turns out there was none. This means everybody was able to claim your hard work as their own. This was the first big NONO i stumbled upon.

The Downsides of TopBuzz as a YouTuber

After my import went through i started to check how my content is displayed. Then the next two NONO’s hit me. Number one being the description of my Videos was simply cut off after a certain amount of characters. So this means no opting out users to your affiliate links, websites etc. Number two is the way they handle your video. They disable any kind of direct interaction with your video on Youtube. Meaning every time someone comments or likes your video, it’s running against TopBuzz’s own Community. So you won’t be getting any additional interaction with users on your YouTube Channel. This also means no new followers through TopBuzz. They can actually open your Video on YouTube, but the explicitly have to open it. On top of all that you will not receive any Adsense Revenue through views on TopBuzz. They are running their own ads on your videos.

All these things considered i still decided to continue my test for a few more days. After the first few days your analytics start to kick in on TopBuzz. I started to notice two things. On TopBuzz i had a lot of views with just a few seconds of Watch time. Naturally some of my content was watched regularly. The same time on YouTube my views from suggested videos dropped dead. Then it hit me. The way TopBuzz is displaying my content is killing my traffic. The reason for that is easy. If they have the Auto Playback Option enabled in their App, every time someone is scrolling past your video they initiate a Watch Session. The Moment they decide to browse further the Session ends. What does that mean for you and the YouTube algorithm? For starters your Average View Duration drops dramatically and in consequence of the amount of Sessions your Videos are ending YouTube thinks your Content isn’t watch worthy. So TopBuzz is killing the views on your channel through this behaviour if you have educational content like I do.

Topbuzz Still has Potential

Depending on the content you are creating, TopBuzz seriously can hurt your channel. Their format is focusing on a whole different kind creator then the average YouTuber. In my opinion Videos we know from Facebook or Instagram are well better fitted. They are just a few seconds long and most of the time they don’t require an audio output. This is the kind of content that actually works on TopBuzz. Also if you like to serve your audience with good articles you have a chance to succeed on TopBuzz. Actually i heard from someone that articles work rather well and if you hit the right spot you even can go “viral”.

There are two more things you should consider before you sign up for TopBuzz. If you sign up, at the moment there is no way to delete your account. You can only break the import feed to your content and remove all the synced content. Depending on the amount of content you have this can take a while. Another in my opinion very important thing is the way how they handle your monetisation. There is absolutely no way specify any kind of tax information. So if you are going to declare your income, which by the way you should and must, there is no way to do it properly at the moment. So for me this is the ultimate knockout for TopBuzz.

My Verdict

I think TopBuzz has a lot of potential, but at the moment it’s more like a work in progress thing than an actual viable option. So if you are a YouTube Creator that is focused on creating engaging “classic” YouTube Content, TopBuzz isn’t the right place for you. I’ll definitely keep my eyes on them but for now I also stay as far away as i can