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…
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.
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.
YouTube Closed Captions: Twish1999 Is Payment For The Well?
Music videos are traditionally the most popular, most viewed content on YouTube. YouTube and Universal teamed up to create VEVO, with content from a variety of record companies. It was going to solve all the disputes about copyright material and royalties and ad revenues. In theory, at least…
YouTube have launched yet another blog… this one aimed squarely at content creators. It features video project ideas – such as video reviews, puppetry videos – as well as general YouTube news (cross posted from YouTube’s main blog) and promotions for things like Davos, Dr. Phil’s arts initiative and Amnesty International.
Butterflies – the movie whose tag line reads “You too can YouTube. You too can be a Butterfly” – is now available to watch online. The movie which features the likes of Cory “Mr. Safety” Williams, Michael “What The Buck” Buckley, Jill “xGobobeanx” Hanner and others can now be rented online from Booserver.com.
In the spirit of Vlogtober (the practice of creating a vlog every single day in October), I’ve created a vlog every single day this month. Now you can watch them all through this playlist.
For many of us (at least those of us who are Windows users) our first port of call when it came to video editing was Windows Movie Maker. Well now Microsoft have reinvented Movie Maker and included it as part of their Windows Live Essential suite.
Battle Of The YouTube Non-Stars, a competition that pins YouTube newcomers against each other in hopes of bringing some fresh faces to our attention, has returned! This time Non-Star veteran Sam Proof takes over as host from JenLuv37, and we’re already seeing some great content from the competitors.