Over the past five months we have created around 100 Zillow walk through videos for many of you. We reported on the great success these videos have brought to you by improving the visibility of your listings in this very competitive marketplace. Most of those videos were “value priced” and a no-brain add on to your normal photo shoots. They were effective. You can read my report on their effectiveness here: Zillow Videos First Report
AND THEN Jan 8th Disaster struck Zillow… OH THE HORROR. Zillow (not me) LOST every video on their system. To comprehend the magnitude of this you have to understand Zillow requires you to use their phone APP and on upload Zillow erases all traces of that video from the phone. They had millions of videos. They no have the only copy of that video, their rules not mine. They all are reported as lost.
Or are they really lost? As many of you know I’m kind of OCD’ed about data and take a lot of precautions to back up everything. I’m a DATA HOARDER. Yep I have around a million images from over the past 10 years. Did you think I would not figure a way to back up those videos? Well as far as I can tell, and I belong to a group of around 10,000 photographers from around the country, I’m the only one, thanks to my extensive IT background, that figured out how to grab these prior to uploading to Zillow and then back them up.
I have been in contact with Zillow and they have agreed to allow me to use the same Drop Box they assigned me to send them Premium Videos, for these lower end “walk through” videos. I have to caution you there though, while I have uploaded some from this process Zillow has still yet to fix their problem and they have yet to make these live. They have two problems there, (1) no videos play on Zillow right now and (2) they lost all the videos they had. They must fix (1) and then they suggest you just shoot those again. REALLY?
So here is where we are:
1) Please don’t jump on me. I had an actual backup plan where Zillow’s process apparently failed.
2) On Zillow fixing the “Player” problem then we can move to step (3)
3) I upload the “missing” videos and then have to still wait for Zillow to manually add them to the listing. Keep in mind they have to do that for the Premium videos also. It’s a manual process.
So there is still hope but time will tell. I have done all I can up to this point.
Please don’t show up on my doorstep with Pitch Forks. I’m doing all I can and incidentally that is more than any other photographer in the area could possibly do. I was at least prepared. The others were not. Feel free to show up at Zillow’s doorstep with Pitch Forks though.
I will keep you all updated as more is learned about this serious issue.
Ain’t technology great!