Strategic tagging on YouTube

I just wrapped up a mini-case study on tagging at YouTube for the book (one of the very last sections). When I get it back from the tech reviewer I'm thinking of adding a quote from this Techcrunch article on how to market viral videos:

8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole

This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.

I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

Diabolical.

I wonder if people will be bothered by this, or if they're happy just to be entertained. In other words, to what extent does the authenticity of the videos (and the comments, ratings, etc.) contribute to the overall experience? It matters to me, but I'm not sure it matters to everyone else.

On the other hand, I enjoyed Mike Arrington comment: "frankly I’m disgusted by this." (The other comments are enlightening too.)