There are a few buzzwords that irk me. First is “viral video.” A viral video is a rare and beautiful thing, but we know that only about .33 percent of videos on YouTube have over a million views, and there are a lot that are effective that have far fewer views (53 percent of videos on YouTube have less than 500 views). People throw around this term carelessly to describe any video made for the web. Let’s just use the term web video. I was cheering when Rob Davis from Ogilvy said the same thing on stage this week at the Brightcove Video Monetization Summit in NY.
I’ve noticed this particularly on television where every online video mentioned is considered a ‘viral’ video.
None of my videos have gone ‘viral.’ But you could be forgiven for thinking they had the plague since no one goes near any of them…
After writing about Number Games I came to realise that my YouTube experience was fairly insular.
What I’m wondering is:
* How do you find cool people on YouTube?
* Who do you think is doing great stuff on YouTube? (And if you think you’re doing great stuff on YouTube, I want to know about it! Now’s no time to be modest.)
Thank you to MuggleSam who has been pimping the hell out of my channel. I’m almost at a 1000 subscribers. Fun times!
Remember Battle of the YouTube Stars/Non-Stars by DiGiTiLsOuL & JenLuv37 ?? Someone has brought it back! Check out Users SubscriberSURVIVOR.
I want to talk about Subscriber Survivor in a moment. But just in case anyone isn’t aware JenLuv37′s Battle Of The YouTube Non-Stars is now in it’s third season, hosted by SamProof. (Though it does seem to be on hiatus at the moment due to his involvement in the Ford Fiesta Movement.) You can listen to the interview I did with SamProof about Non-Stars on The JOJCAST.
Subscriber Survivor is actually a lot fun. It models that YouTube Stars/Non-Stars format that many of us will be familiar with, and the three hosts’ antics are as entertaining as the antics of the contestants. Contestants are subjected to ‘Immunity Challenges’ and one contestant is automatically passed through to the next round (this is judged by the hosts themselves).
There is a part of me that wonders how long this competition will last though. It suffers from some (shall we say) ‘intellectual property issues.’ The first episode features a lot of Los Del Rio’s version of the Macarena and I guess the contestants – some of who are YouTube Partners – might be grateful that the copyrighted music appears on this separate channel and not their own.
One final caveat… If you want to actually affect the outcome of this competition you are required to subscribe to every contestant in the competition. There’s something rather odd about voting someone out of a competition that you just subscribed to.
This is one of the most pervasive paradoxes surrounding online video. When it comes to numbers – be they subscribers or views – they somehow mean everything and nothing, simultaneously. We don’t ‘care’ about them, we aren’t motivated by them, though, oddly enough, we are happy when they go up.
YouTube are very insistent that their closed caption audio transcription service is in beta and when you stop to test it out for yourself, you quickly realise why. It leaves a lot to be desired. But, on the upside, the gap between what is actually said and what is ‘transcribed’ lends itself to much hilarity.
While many of us made New Years Resolutions about trying to lose weight and quitting smoking, Josh set us sights on some slightly different things. One of them was to do a stand up comedy routine.
Ever wonder what equipment some of your favourite video creators use to create their content? I spoke to seven such video creators about their setup. This week’s JOJCAST is proof that you don’t need the biggest and best equipment, you just have to use what you have in a thoughtful manner.