YOUTUBE videos SUCK and other observations....

[milowent]

[warning long post]

The Creators placement of a screencap of bree into the center of the Unthinkable Happened Video (and posting the video on Bree's account instead of the Danielbeast account) got me thinking about jay's post a few weeks ago about how scammers are hurting legitimate videos at youtube.

The Unthinkable Happened is current showing up at #16 on the Most Viewed This Week chart (376K+ views).

Let's look at what constitutes the cream of the crop this week, shall we?
Well, among this week's top 20 is a lot of trash:

1. EastCoastBob JJ chokes on Live TV..MSNBC MisterClip Clip of an MSNBC anchor losing her voice while commenting on saddam. Not funny. (Posted Dec 29, 1.3million+ views)

2. saddam idam Arabic language newsclip on saddam hanging. (Posted Dec. 30, 1.3million+ views)

3. Saddam Hussein HangingA 3 second vid showing saddam in the noose, and fake tougue sticks out. (Posted 29, 1.1million+ views)

4. Dirt Premiere Party Footage from premiere party from this new FX network show, on the FX youtube channel. (Posted Dec. 28, 943K+ views). Clearly scammed, has almost 1 million views, but only 52 comments.

5. Cutie Custom Maxim-type video of some japanese model. (Posted Jan 1, 815K+ views)

6. Saddam Hussein Execution Exclusive from Baghdad Another fake Saddam hanging vid. (Posted Dec 29, 682K+ views)

7. If You Had 15 Seconds A call from that late show talk host with the scottish accent (what's his name again)? For people to submit 15 sec videos, with a chance to be aired after the Superbowl. From the official CBS channel (Posted Dec. 29, 674K+ views)

8. Saddam Hussein Executed Live Hanging 30-12-2006 3:05 a.m/ Yet another fake saddam hanging video. (Dec. 29, 650K+ views)

9. Featured Video Intro (Updated Hourly). apparently a leftover 3 second intro segment to the new year's feature youtube did, sponsored by Chevy. (Posted Dec. 29, 547K+ views)

10. Saddam Hussein Hanging. It's not. (Posted Dec. 29, 561K+ views [will move to #9 at next chart ordering)

11. Tara Reid counts down to 2007 in Chicago with Efren Ramirez! Who actually counts all the way down from 60?!! I have no clue how it got this many views. (Posted Jan 2, 769K+ views -- will be moving up a few notches at next ordering)

12. Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make III. (Dec 29, 489K+ views) FINALLY! A real youtuber makes a video that is on the chart!!! But ... it is a stupid video of him making silly faces and noises to the webcam. So, of course Youtube featured it! The creator himself says: "P.S. - Thanks for the feature, Youtube. This video is a shining example of how one can be lauded for something that they put little or no effort into. This video took 20 minutes to make, edit, and post. ... Seriously, I totally agree with everyone who says this shouldn't have been featured. For those who put time and effort into making other videos (including myself), I sincerely apologize.

13. Happy New Year Beavers (Dec 31, 515K+ views) A totally ridiculous video of some animals (stills) saying stuff about a happy new years. But another authentic youtuber, who says: And before you all start slagging off my video... this was made for my group of friends, endearingly called the Beavers (hence the Happy New Year Beavers title). I created it to use on my blog to wish them all a Happy New Year.
As I don't have a video server the easiest way to share this video was to upload it to Youtube and I put it in the New Year catagory.... why it has been featured... I have no idea. ... No the video didn't take a long time to make, it was knocked up using multiple frames in WMM... Prefer not to receive insulting comments as I didn't make the video for anyone else but my friends....

14. Saddam's Execution footage (Real) (Dec 29, 419K+views) GUESS WHAT!! It's not the real footage!!!! What a surprise.

15. DZ Ozma (Dec 31, 515K+ views) The Japanese TV clip from their New Year's Eve show. What a silly song -- "bounce bounce bounce"? Anyhow, all the girl dancers go topless as it progresses, which was a big hubbub in japan (apparently they were wearing bodysuits).

16. The Unthinkable Happened. (Jan 1, 420K+ views). Yes, it truly is unthinkable. It is amazing that a video made specifically for internet viewers, one that people spent time on, actually made the most viewed list at youtube. And without being featured. This is from the most subscribed youtube channel of all time. Does anyone else really have a chance of making the most viewed lists (without being featured) these days with a legitimate video? Probably not.

17. MY 1ST PORNO - tell me what you think, sex, christina (Dec 7, 368K+ views). This uses the traditional scamming technique of inserting a hot chick at the center of video having nothing to do with it. Also, the comment sidebar is just a tremendous huge tagcloud meant to gather hits. The actual subject of the video is the alleged conspiracy around the collapse World Trade Center Building 7. Also completely scammed, as it has only 4 comments.

18. sonja kraus upskirt 2. (Dec 29, 362K+ views). A little bit of underwear goes far, i guess.

19. Happy New Year (Jan 1, 384K+ views). An authethic older vlogger. (nice comment: "why are there so many old people posting videos on YouTube?" yes, its forbidden, is it not?). How did it get this high? It got featured, of course.

20. UFC 66: Liddell vs. Ortiz 2 - THIS SATURDAY NIGHT! (Dec 28, 350K+ views) From the official ultimate fighting championship channel. Thank god this sport can still make the top 20.

No, you don't need to thank me for enriching your life by sharing all these precious videos with you!

[Terryfic]

Well at a site that features Blendtec* and a parody of Blendtec it is pretty clear the goal is not to advance intelligent well made videos. It is just a giant america’s funniest home videos, which substituted a terrible host, with a terrible, easily manipulated, video ranking system. But, after all that was the original goal of YouTube. It never claimed to be anything like atomfilms. They pull people in with the Schadenfreude, and sometimes hook them with the vloggers or IMSers.

*an infomercial channel that tosses random stuff (like an ipod or a broom) into a blender in a ginsu-knife-threw-a-shoe kind of marketing pitch.

[milowent]

terryfic said:

Well at a site that features Blendtec* and a parody of Blendtec it is pretty clear the goal is not to advance intelligent well made videos.

good thoughts, terry. it is a mess.

but ... dare i admit it ... i loved blendtec parody they featured today. i do love some of the dumb stuff, but only the very best of it.

[buckwheat]

It's the tragedy of the commons:
Took broadcast tv about thirty or forty years to get from primetime, live, 90 minute classical dramas to Jerry Springer, Jackass, and beyond (below?). You Tube's done it in six months. I've watched YT devolve from June when authentic, fresh YouTubers dominated the most viewed page, to the scams, celebrity porn, fake porn, network and corporate promos and the odd idiocy like Milo's #13 that take up all the oxygen these days.
How does something that is open source, free of constraints and easily available to the masses avoid this devolution? Dunno, since it seems to be the norm: (cf: French Revolution, Dylan hawking Victoria's Secrets). The LG creators have had phenomenal luck, and one large bit of that was launching in June, and not in October....

[milowent]

i do think they had great luck by starting in June - they rode the wave at the perfect time.

but our memory of a better youtube 6 months ago may be inaccurate:

here is the top 20 most viewed of the week as of April 24, 2006, preserved by the internet archive. lots of crap still.

web.archive.org/web/20060424222050/www.youtube.com/browse?s=mp&t=w

[Terryfic]

Yeah, to be honest I like the blendtec and its parody. Stupid football-in-the-groin videos are funny, and there will always be a mass market for them. Screens had the piece awhile back about how videos like these that don’t require an understanding of English have a much larger market than those that do, but I think there is more to it that than. People just like stupid shit.

It will always have the largest audience as there are no prerequisites to its enjoyment. If I want to enjoy a show like LG, well first I have to have seen the previous episodes, plus I have to like the idea of a mystery/suspense story, I also have to be committed to keep coming back since the story isn’t completed at the end of the video; it is a lot of work. Most of the people at YouTube are looking for one off videos, not for something that they can keep coming back for more of. This will likely change as it evolves into something more like online television

milowent said:

but our memory of a better youtube 6 months ago may be inaccurate

I think Milo might be right that YouTube was never a utopia, likely the ratio of scams and junk videos is the same. There is just so much traffic at the site now, that relatively small number rubbish overwhelms everything else.

buckwheat said:

How does something that is open source, free of constraints and easily available to the masses avoid this devolution?

I don’t think it is possible to prevent the devolution of a site once it becomes massively popular. That is why I think web 2.0 is fundamentally flawed. Entertainment, like science, should not be democratically created.

[hyemew]

Wow, a list like that really makes me reconsider the "artistic revolution" that YT has been heralded to be. That list just makes it seem like a vehicle for easy access to stupidity.

[milowent]

quickly looking at the top 20 this week as of this morning, i noted the following very funny spoof of the "dick in a box" vid is #1:

How To Get A Guy In Silicon Valley
www.youtube.com/watch?v=co9qBme4Dgk
(Currently #1 most viewed this week - 1.1million+ views - was featured by YouTube)

---

#2 is an obvious commercial for Dove.
Dove Cream Oil Body Wash
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIRS95CbJNw
Has over a million views, i can't see how this wasn't scammed (or even worse, had its counter set high by YouTube in return for a fee?)

[hyemew]

I just have some random observations which don't really merit their own thread:

1. I still hate miaarose and her being allowed to stay at fourth place despite the rampant cheating I witnessed first hand on her part.
2. In the realm of website views, the lonelygirl15.com plummet continues with no end in sight. According to Alexa, on Sunday it had fallen to the point where it was in a dead heat with smosh.com. It's latest update, yesterday, now has smosh.com's view count SURPASSING lonelygirl15's.
If you compare their rate of subscribers, which is just looking at their number on the top 20 main page (which is always at least a few hours and likely more behind) and the more current number listed on their user pages, lonelygirl15 vs. smosh looks like this:

WAS IS
LG15 81544 - 81687= 143
SMOSH 52148 - 52310= 162
At least they're pretty similar, so no worries about smosh surmounting lg15, at least not in the near future. That would be disasterous. I enjoyed their early lip synching days, mainly because I enjoyed the old songs and stuff- however everything they've made, well basically ever since, is God awful. Maybe one mildly funny thing per video if any. However they get loads of views and people commenting "THAT WAS THE FUNNIEST THING I EVER SAW." It annoys me to no end. They truly are the Dane Cook of YT (meaning they aren't funny at all and yet everyone seems to think so...)

(An addenum, which ended up being very long):
Just about every one of the past 12 smosh videos is in the 300,000 views range, which I would say is better than your average lg video but actually it's not. While The Cowboy only has a pithy 170,000 views after 5 days while the latest smosh of three days ago has over 300,000- one must keep in mind smosh videos are fewer and further between meaning that views get broken up between more videos instead of all viewers being concentrated on the most recent video for a week or two at a time.
I also wonder about the effect the automatic play of the most recent video on lg15's yt page has on the view count, something smosh does not do (but it probably doesn't have that big an effect.) While Bree's three latest videos before the current one (Cowboy, Sleepover, Looking) are only in the 170s, 270s, and 170s respectively, the one before it Daniel is Missing has an astronomical 687,000 views in 11 days. That's far more than the Kath. McPhee episode even got. I keep wondering about what this all means for lg's future and fan base. It's so odd the way certain videos only get fairly low numbers and yet others get huge ones. Meanwhile the number of website videos has been dropping considerably. What does it all mean? I'm so confused.

[milowent]

looks like ysabellabrave (another singer chick) is having some stat manipulation too. look at her subscriber history:

www.bkserv.net/YTS/YTTop100Chart.aspx?id=23&name=ysabellabrave

1/7/07: 2733 subscribers
1/14/07: 6403
1/27/07: 7682
2/4/07: 12722

FYI, this chart comes from the youtubestars blog, which keeps track of stats of the top 100 youtube channels.

www.bkserv.net/YTS/YTTop100.aspx?p=1

[curiousgeorge]

milowent said:

FYI, this chart comes from the youtubestars blog, which keeps track of stats of the top 100 youtube channels.

www.bkserv.net/YTS/YTTop100.aspx?p=1

I took a quick glance and did NOT find either Tachyon or Op or Brother in the top 100. (some of the Tachyon vids are currently on the Gemma, #22, site, but my guess is that her number of subscribers is related to earlier offerings not "related" to the ARG)

If the creators are using these vids as major storyline devices, what does this mean for them at this point? I know their master plan is to try and get as many viewers to the mothership, but isn't this really gonna leave the casual YT viewer very confused if they don't know about these offerings?

[Smashing]

I have no idea if those singers are cheating because I haven't been following it, and if you say they are cheating, I believe you. But in general, I want to throw out there that there are some things that can give someone a big jump in subscribers that are "invisible"

1) A Shoutout from a popular YouTuber. -- 5 days ago, Renetto encouraged his viewers to subscribe to a South African guy named Khayav, because among other things he's black (some kind of Affirmative YouTube Action). He added about 1,000 subscribers. A couple days later, he was featured by YouTube, and he added another 1,300.
2) being embedded/linked on outside sites. -- If a video is embedded in a popular blog like BoingBoing or is linked on a social bookmarking site like Digg, that's big exposure.
3) having your video featured on another video site. -- I noticed an Abbegirl MySpace video got featured on MySpace once, which wouldn't directly help her YouTube views, but for those who clicked her profile, they would see a message telling them to subscribe to her on YouTube.
4) Appearing on TV/Radio or getting other traditional press (LG was the biggest recipient of this)

[milowent]

smashing said:

But in general, I want to throw out there that there are some things that can give someone a big jump in subscribers that are "invisible"

i agree smashing, you can't discount the fact that there are legitimate ways to have a subscriber jump. i've also seen it suggested that the youttube subscriber number sometime gets off, and when it is reset, you can see a big jump for a channel.

[hyemew]

Current observations:
LG page views still low but have had a slight upturn. I guess they reached their lowest possible and are slowly going up. There's no saying whether that upturn will keep going or stay stable, we'll see.
Meanwhile, remember how I said smosh was blowing passed them? Well suddenly they went crashing down. They are far below LG15 now, no clue what happened.
And-
BREAKING NEWS: Number 3 all time subscribers CBS is off the top 20! I wonder what happened?

[milowent]

hyemew said:

BREAKING NEWS: Number 3 all time subscribers CBS is off the top 20! I wonder what happened?

looks like CBS changed its profile pic - the video it is from is not pulling up right now, so they may be off the list temporarily.