No Man’s Blog

Zizou moment of madness, obscure Asian TV, political commentary, and one (not so) lonely girl…

Due to the overwhelming success of the first report, as promised I have now completed YouTube trends report #2, focusing this time on the 100 most viewed videos of the month. YouTube is now a living and breathing zeitgeist engine, streaming more than 100,000,000 views and take in 65000 new videos a month. Everything that is currently meaningful to people, from the world cup through the Middle East conflict to rising stars, young & gifted and next big things in music and entertainment are all there. And the fact that the chart is updated daily (i.e. most viewed in last 30 days) makes it even more dynamic and zeitgeistic (mind you, at least 5 videos have moved in/out only between yesterday’s late night to today’s early morning).

What an abundance of (mostly user generated) content!
You Tube is increasingly a global playground for news, entertainment, self-expression and explosive creativity – the revolution is unfolding (or uploading…) and the beauty of it is that it feels so rudimentary… like it’s just a beginning of something so much bigger….

When I say global playground, I mean it literally with 12 Asian videos, 5 Spanish/ Latin, 2 German, 3 Portuguese, 2 Arabic, 1 Dutch, 1 Italian and 1  Hebrew. That’s more than quarter of non-English most viewed video this month. 

To start with some figures #1 most viewed video this month indisputably with 6,068,125 is a political commentary on the excessive use of force by police forces (can anyone tell where?). Closing the chart #100  is one of of 19 (!) Zidane-related videos on YouTube this month with 237,423. 

Before I start breaking the chart I’d like to raise two issues. First, as fellow blogger and YT analyst James Kelm told me, one challenge with identifying YT trends is that the tail is tremendously long.  As best as he could tell, the all times top 100 chart analysed in the first report accounts for only about 2% of total views at the current run rate. That’s staggering. The top 100 most viewed this month is a much better database to spot YT trends, as a quick calculation revealed, together, these videos been watched 50,967,641 times (at the time I sat down to write this report) – this accounts for about 50% of all videos watched this month, so we can get a better picture on this viral theme-park that is YouTube.

Secondly, and this is really an open question, what is the most inclusive definition of User Generate Content? As I see it, everything that has been uploaded without commercial / marketing / promotional purpose in mind is UGC. That includes clips that were on TV, movies etc and for some reason been uploaded to YouTube, like sports great moments, or a bit from Paris Hilton TV Show. Yet this definition poses a difficulty to the analysis, especially with commercial music videos. Take Beyonce’s 2 identical appearances for example - one was uploaded exclusively for YouTube by a smart marketer and the other by enthuse fan but sometime you just can’t tell. For now, I’ll leave music videos of the UGCs.   

OK, enough with the bla bla…show me the numbers!

CNN business 2.0, just announced that YOU (i.e. the consumer as creator) is the #1 most important person in business right now before google founders and Steve Jobs. It is hard to disagree with this when you think of 86% (!) of all most viewed videos of the month are User Generated.

There’s a lot of UGC trends to report so lets quickly get over with what’s not:

• 7 commercial music videos, all of which are sexy R&B shake-dat-booty genre (except the cheesy Hoff). All are resourcefully produced except this one, which feels rough and immateur – can anyone enlighten us on the story of this?

• 3 commercial (?) virals, one for Nintendo, one for Sony Erickson W800! mobile phone, and one for Portal.

• 2 production company own promos (1, 2)

• 1 viral marketing agency really daft self viral

• 1 brilliant German animation

Of 86 User generate Content there are:

• 30 sport related videos. This is clearly the month of the world cup on YT with 28 videos, of which 7 are different angels to the Zizou incident (some of them are completely identical) and 12 creative responses/ spoofs / mash-ups on that incident. As far as I was able to detect, this is the one that sparked this flow of creativity after Zizou’s moment of madness. The rest are related to Rooney’s red card and some penalties shoot-out. Interestingly enough there are 3 identical videos of the same Brazilian (?) presenter reporting on the Italian victory. Other sport related videos are amazing dunk, and some eurotrash football.

• 8 political/news commentaries. From #1 to the recent Middle East crises (personal experiences in Israel, Lebanon), through Jon Stewart, Bush back-scratching Merkel, Mexican elections (#2!) to this 2003 creative protest it seems like YT is progressively facilitating political commentary and reports from around the world. I predict that this trend will grow in parallel to the citizen journalists’ trend and we’ll see quite a lot these in the future.

• 34 young creatives. Perhaps this title is too inclusive as it comprises of both the fairly ‘effortless’ lip synching through to some quite amazing works. So let me break it down:

• 12 Zidane spoofs previously discussed
• Quite amazing achievement to LG (and her boyfriend Daniel), better known as lonelygirl15 that creates her own vlogs where she talks about life, parents, boyfriend and other stuff. She currently has 6 different videos on the most viewed this month, which together have been watched more than 1.2 million times.
• 9 shorts. There are some really beautiful works here from aspiring young directors/editors/actors/producers, such as this quasi-arty mute film, this star wars spoof, and another Brookers moment.  Also in this category, if you fancy free acid trip try this video…(my favourite for this report - i’m a sucker for optical illusions and visual manipulations!)
• 3 lip synching. These kids are new entry with the most annoying song ever!
• 3 daft manipulators. As YT gets bigger and bigger there are people trying to manipulate the system and push some really lame and meaningless videos, using seductive titles like this for the sole purpose of generating views.
• 1 brilliant mac spoof

• 14 home videos. A collection of both original and recycled (been on TV) videos. funny, scary, talent, magical,  amusing,(can this be a viral for FedEX?) as well as 2 UK Big Brother videos and 1 Paris Hilton tipical moment .

• 12 Asian TV videos. My linguistic and cultural ignorance hinder deeper analysis as it was quite difficult for me to comprehend some of these obscure videos, so if any of you can break this category and provide a meaningful examination I’d be grateful. There are some really murky videos here from this soft porn contest, through live gig, to news , pop-idol(?) and more.

Before I conclude this report I’d like to start a new segment: "What the f**k?" In each report I’ll choose 1-3 of the most obscure / weird / unfathomable videos I came across while conducting the report.  Get this, and this.

That’s it for now, please comment your suggestions for improving these reports or mark any inaccuracies. Next report in about a month or so.

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