We all have used youtube to watch music videos and I know a few people that sit at their desks all day and have youtube playing in the background as their own personal jukebox.
Since January (I know I am a bit late here, but I was really busy) this has become a hell of a lot easier with youtube disco.
And I have to say that even though it is quite simple and not to fancy on the eye, it is one of the fastest and most accurate ways to find your music (videos) and related artists. It also gives you a little insight into the artist and you can add videos individually or just add them all.
Then all you have to do is mix it all up manually or press the shuffle button
One thing I found very interesting is that the videos shown are not the official ones, but created by fans.
The only other site I have seen that would rival this is the Channel V site here. you can browse the whole site and never lose the music video you are watching.
What do you get if you take a ukulele, a 6 year old and the most popular song of 2008?
Forget kittens & unicorns, this video is pretty much one of the cutest things we’ve ever seen.
At over 540,000 views in 5 days, we predict he’ll be at well over two million by mid next week!
Got a recipe for a better viral video? We’d love to hear it!
The song is I’m Yours, by Jason Mraz.
The comment below under Chris Brown’s new YouTube video says it all. Whilst Chris attempts to use social media channels to apologise for his recent crimes the comment picks up and alerts others to the fact that Chris is clearly reading from a script. Best use of social media, especially in times where an audience needs to trust what you’re saying requires a level authenticity. If you plan to use social media for disaster management your audience will generally respond better if the presentation is spontaneous, unedited, unscripted, warts n’all included. In this instance Chris Brown has committed several sins: The video is over produced, he’s wearing designer clothing (further distancing himself from real people), the clip has been edited, eye contact with the camera is poor. The result is that he fails to connect on a human level with his audience. His apology appears contrived and the mass volume of responses fails to respond as he probably would have liked, the majority rejecting what they see.
Watch the Jet Blue clip at the bottom. It’s a good example of ‘how to’ handle a disaster using social media.
Above – users are quick to notice that Chris is reading from a script, and many comment that this likely to have been written by someone else.
The result
David Neeleman (ex CEO of Jet Blue) shows how to apologise in a more genuine manner. Unscripted, rough edges, word stumbles, continued eye contact, make this a more believable message for the audience.
There’s been so much hype about social media in the last 12 months but beyond the hype lies some fascinating data. Twitter has been grabbing a lot of the media headlines, but it is important to keep some perspective around the relative scales of the social sites and in particular the continued growth of Facebook.
Above: Facebook dominates search trends. Whilst most rank sites by UBs and UVs, Facebook is the #1 site in the world in terms of time spent and search volume.
In 2008, Facebook did the unthinkable and overtook Google and YouTube for trending search volume. Since then it has continued its climb relentlessly. To put a relative scale on the graph above it is interesting to compare it with the spikes caused by Obama during election and inauguration. You quickly get the idea. Facebook has become a giant and shows no sign of slowing at present. In Australia over 5 million users spend an average of over 4 hours on the site each month, (compare that with less than an hour with Google).
Facebook Stats July 2009 (via Facebook):
International Usage
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
General Growth
More than 250 million active users
More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
User Engagement
Average user has 120 friends on the site
More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
More than 8 million users become fans of Pages each day
Applications
More than 1 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 10 million videos uploaded each month
More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
More than 2.5 million events created each month
More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site
Mobile
There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
Hulu’s super fast rise to 2nd place in the online video market has forced the Google owned Youtube into coming up with actual strategies to make some money. Funny, I’d have thought it would be common sense that brought this on…
So, a few numbers: 100 Million – Estimated times Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent video has been watched. 0 – the amount of dollars made from those impressions.
I think those numbers are enough for now…
Google has stepped up actions to try and make some serious money from the worlds number one video site by ‘setting up partnerships with big media companies that would help it generate more advertising dollars from the millions of videos hosted on YouTube.’
Partnerships with Sony Pictures, CBS, Lions Gate and others are set to provide movie trailers, TV shows and music video content to the site in a bid to make it more attractive for advertisers. As it stands marketers are reluctant to advertise due to the unpredictable and often inappropriate content uploaded by Youtube’s users.
As it stands, ads only show up on between 3% – 9% of the sites’ videos. – eMarketer
To catch up with Hulu, Youtube’s gong to need to supply users with a lot of partner content that they’ll actually want to watch. Is this going to have the same repercussions for overseas users as it Hulu does? And if so, how do we get around this? Surely Youtube’s customer base stretches far and above the USA, yet how to US only partnerships benefit this international userbase?
I have a lot of questions about this, and as we see, so do Google who’re doing anything they can to get out of their massive $471 Million deficit every year.
This handy Businessweek article (which prompted me to write) has some of the answers but also provokes a lot of other questions about the model which has yet to be tried and tested.
Check out this new ad for Honda by Wieden + Kennedy in Amsterdam that uses a pantload of cars, a cool trick of perspective and some kind of crazy headlight automation program to do some pretty amazing pixel art with some LED headlights.
Join four YT clips together and what do you get? A YouTube hack that admittedly takes ages to load …but is still worth watching just for the novelty. Enjoy. (Especially the Rick Rolling bit). http://mrdoob.com/lab/youtube/superHD/chromeless/
I’m sure that this is what Rick Astley had in mind, all those years ago, when he recorded the most annoying song in the history of songs which would then turn into the most annoying internet prank of all time…on a float with a bunch of second-rate muppets.
YouTube have gone widescreen with all their content (blog announcement). Some may see this as a strange move given that most content for the site is in 4:3 ratio as default. Unfortunately the problem is that I could not find a video that did not have black bars down the side. So where is all the native 16:9 YouTube content? (Searching for 16:9 does not find much). Here’w what YT says:
“We’re expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don’t worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player”
Personally I would think that maybe YT would have been better off detecting what the native aspect ratio is and the have a different template – possibly be a little better in terms of presentation, and a little less impact on users. Content Creators tend to have pride in getting the format and presentation layer correct. The black bars do make all the videos look a little dated.
Yuk… The black bars are EVERYWHERE!!!
Future Guide: If you want to upload native 16:9 content to YouTube you’ll need to upload videos as a 640×360 or other 16:9 aspect ratio.
The same content embedded does not affect external pages, although I could not see how to embed a widescreen version of the above.
No black bars when you embed… for now.
More aspect issues: Unfortunately Standard Widescreen cinema works at 1:85 and Cinemascope widescreen is at 2:35 – so videos like the WOW Lich King trailed end up with bars on the top! (here)
Ultimately there are 4 standard aspect ratios for content. 4:3, 16:9 1:85 and 2:35. Why can’t we have them all??
YouTube has launched a new feature as part of its Insight tool for content creators that allows members to visually examine exactly where in their videos their viewers gain and lose interest. The new feature, called Hot Spots, displays the dropoff data in a dynamic graph that can be viewed alongside the original video.
To determine which points in a video are “hot”, Hot Spots compares each video to other videos of similar length on YouTube – if people are leaving more quickly than average at a given time, you’ll know you have some tweaking to do. The site also tracks rewind and fast forward data, so you can see if viewers are repeatedly watching a certain segment.
There are a number of obvious applications for the new feature: publishers can objectively determine which segments of the video are the most appealing, and edit their content accordingly. Advertisers can use multiple YouTube videos to run different versions of an ad to see which ones are the most effective.
Amnesia Razorfish is a digital marketing agency headquartered in Sydney, Australia. It is the Australian arm of Razorfish, one of the largest digital agencies in the world.
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