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YouTube Video Stats, Sharing, and 2007 Re-Mixed
destinyland writes "YouTube's most popular videos in 2007 were a bunch of major label music videos, and YouTube is scrambling to re-assure the net roots community with an alternate list of 2007's "Most Memorable" videos. 'The rankings, released by YouTube on Thursday, took into account the most shared, most discussed, top rated and general popularity of clips...' One article argues that the real trend in 2007 was viral re-mixes of the original viral videos. 'In 2007 the viral video stars spawned their own wave of counter-memes, proving once again that the internet moves in mysterious ways.'"
Please TZ, what happened with the Dr. Pepper video?!
YouTube needs some kind of flagging system:
They should choose the most memorable one.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
All those major label videos are costing Youtube money to show, that's why embedding is disabled for many of those most viewed videos - because they have to pay a cut of the Ad revenue, and with embedded videos they're not getting any direct ad revenue. This is exactly why youtube wants to promote its 'alternate' list, because otherwise the bloggers won't be able to embed any of the top videos on their pages and drive traffic to youtube.
The problem with any network stats-derived list is that you can't count unique individuals. Multiple users may share an IP address. A given user may have multiple IP addresses. What's worse is that if you count page hits, rather than visitors, you end up counting the same people multiple times. Or are they people? Maybe some/all are scripts. It's not like there's a shortage of scripts for pulling YouTube content, and I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA lawyers have bots which search for keywords that may be of interest. They usually do.
Besides which, I'd far prefer one decent copy of Bill Baggs' videos to be up there, and maybe some of the rarer broadcast sci-fi, such as The Changes or Doomwatch, where efforts to make them available legally are either derisory or non-existent. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of copies of the same music video in many cases. People should be able to enjoy music, sure, but what possible benefit is there to having so many identical versions? Greater diversity of content would benefit more people and increase the value of the service as a whole.
(I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA would prefer no copies at all, but that's not going to happen and it wouldn't be good for it to happen. That being said, YouTube needs to be more than about those two - their egos or their products.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm wondering whether youtube serves up more mainstream commercial videos (as people might assume from reading the article), or more of the "viral" content for which youtube became famous. In itself, the fact that the most popular videos were commercial does not answer this question. Imagine there are 1000 videos on youtube - 100 "mainstream" and 900 "viral." Now imagine 1100 people visit youtube. 900 choose randomly from the viral videos (for an average of 1 viewing each) while the other 200 choose a mainstream video at random (for an average of 2 viewings each). In this case, all the most popular videos are mainstream even though 80% of the viewings are viral.
Since TFA didn't provide any links, here are all of the videos mentioned. A lot of these are old favorites, but there are a couple I hadn't seen.
Obama Girl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU
Leave Britney Alone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc
Battle at Kruger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM
Esmee Denters sings Justin Timberlake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Grnh7Qin8
Chocolate Rain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA
Nora the Cat plays piano: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ860P4iTaM
Otters holding hands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno
But I wonder why the labels are not embracing youtube more. It seems like the same mistake with MTV in the mid 80's. This was a good time for the music industry. CDs had people paying again for music they already owned, and MTV was pushing the music without huge expense to the labels. Sure the labels had to produce the videos, but that was, of course, mostly at the artists expense. This reversed a downhill slide in music sales. Extrapolating from the late 70's sales, it is likely that current sales would be about half of what they are, and only about half the people would be buying.
What is also correlated is that as soon as MTV became less music and more television, the sales growth tapered off. Now did MTV change formats because the saw the labels could no longer push a compelling product, or did the lack of major label cooperation lead to MTV to change formats and end the cheap advertising for the labels? Who knows.
What is clear is that this decline decreased coincidently with introduction of iTunes and the iPod, and we if believe that MTV made a difference, we can see how things like YouTube might be cheap advertising as well. I have read stuff suggesting that a larger percentage of the population buy music now than ever before. I don't know if that is true. Sure they may spend less per person, but perhaps what the labels should do is concentrate more on populous advertising, rather than trying to extract ever more money out of each customers, which will only lead to the problems of the late 70's where they have few customers that are willing be so extremely monetized.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It was a late 2006 video - so it didn't make the list, but is still one of the funniest of all... :)
(No link to Youtube version, since they lamely require registration first...)
Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8572086082639363544&q=monkeyballs&total=584&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
more myminicity bullshit
Am I the only person here who's never seen ANY of these videos? Hell, I'd never heard of Chocolate Rain till I read this story.
(coincidentally the captcha is alerted)
Ebaum's World also needs some kind of flagging system:
1. Clip contains pirated audio and video and logo overlays.
2. Oh...
What's really ironic is how MTV & VH1 have changed ... starting in the 1980s, with mostly music videos, and then almost entirely eliminating the videos in favor of pop culture garbage sometime in the 1990s that doesn't seem to make sense to anyone with greater than an 11th grade education. Now, Youtube comes along, and still has all the pop culture garbage, but it's on demand, so those that enjoy that cr*p can watch it if they choose to, but the rest of us can enjoy our music videos again,... And the numbers are showing that people actually want the quality content over pop culture b.s. Finally, we get some numbers that actually make sense!
You're probably so out of touch you missed this great viral video of 2007.
Sometimes my arms bend back.