No Man’s Blog

The birth of wikiTV, LonelyGirl exposed and one really miserable boy…

While in the first and second YT trends reports I looked at All Times and Monthly most viewed videos (respectively), this time I’ve decided to go one level down and look for some interesting themes in the Most Viewed Videos This Week, a fairly dynamic chart that can be changed by the hour, which makes it a hassle to track… (in classifying and categorizing these videos, I usually go over them few times, watching them all and trying to find some common themes. Now, time constraints won’t allow me to analyze, write and link this report in one go, so coming back to it even from early morning to late evening will see quite a lot of changes…).

It is important to note however that this chart really represents a tiny fraction of the videos being uploaded and watched on this video-sharing behemoth with its tremendously Long Tail.

Alx Clive, whose blog swiftly becomes a significant read on everything internetTV, rightly observed that YouTube is gradually progressing in quality as more young & talented directors/editors/producers are exercising their creativity with better tools and higher levels of production, there is definitely a change for good and you can view today some really creative works. And if we already mentioned Alx and his zeitgeist charts, its also interesting to take a look at a growing trend of new sites/blogs that aims exclusively at tracking, monitoring and digging whats buzzing on YT, google video and co.

Following the 2nd report, a very interesting debate has been initiated on the boundaries of the definition of User-Generated-Content, which made me do some thinking that’s been applied to this report. From now on, there will be three overall categories:

(1) User Generated Content – this category is comprised of every material that has been actually directed/produced/acted/remixed/edited/mashed-up etc. by the users, i.e. every piece of video (including self home videos) that has some labor behind it beyond a simple cut-paste of TV show or magnificent sport moment.

For these I’ve created a separated category (2) User Distributed Content, where all kind of recycled material – old TV, news-clips, sports, movies, politics etc. – that somebody for whatever reasons have decided to cut and upload on YT.

And lastly, (3) Commercial – Everything that has a marketing plan behind it. As you’ll read below, Hollywood and cable TV are discovering the immense power of YT for trailers and promotions, as well as for promotional product demos.

So what was on this week?

As usual, let’s start with some numbers:

• The #1 most viewed video this week been watched 795,190 times. Closing the chart, #100 been watched 61,755 times.

• 13% of videos are non-English, 8 Asian, 3 Spanish and 1 German

User Generated Content – 51%. More that half of all videos watched this week on YT were original production of different genres, levels and quality. The vast majority (48) are from young directors, playing with every aspect of creativity, directing producing acting and re-editing all sorts materials. There are some real kick-ass young directors/producers/editors, experimenting with all sort of stuff and creating some really good works (my favorite).

The melodrama that is LonelyGirl15 aka Bree aka Jessica Rose, that’s been recently ‘exposed’ still attracts hundreds of thousand of viewers and has 5 different videos in this chart. What’s more fascinating is that there are 7 so called LonleyGirl15 “comments” i.e. people who produced a piece of content in relation to LG15, mostly about her being fake etc. Although so far pretty low quality, this is a fascinating emerging trend that Dino dubbed the birth of wikiT: Somebody produce something that sets in motion a chain of co-creation from one or more sources. A piece of video, which is not just a comment/talkback but a creative reply that’s taking control of the plot and both directors co-affect each other. Take a look at this and this cool creative extentions to LG15 and this one for New Numa. I’m still waiting to see a real dialogue emerging between young directors to create some truly unexpected plots. Another example is this respones to the ugly beast that is Mr. Pregnant.

The New Numa Boy is making a big comeback and even declares on a video competition. This can be seen as a sub category of the co-creation or creative dialogue I talked about where one user invites others to create more themed videos like finding the new numa on the block….

Another mini-trend is the rise of the magicians. Some young Hodinis are setting their channels; they go on the streets and perform all kind of cool magic-tricks in allegedly one shot and even make it to Jay Leno’s show. Kudos.

Also in this group, there where 3 simple home videos among which are one of the most funny videos ever that my friend Yuda dubbed a "modern piece of child abuse"… Unfortunately, there are still some daft manipulations (YT spammers) that make it high on the charts. Stupid and bored people that see a challenge in simply generating views on really lame videos that I decided not to link to, which brings us to our WTF?! And this month the most idiotic video that made it to the chart is this one. How the hell this piece of shit being watched 96K times??? I truly hope that as YT matures we will see less and less of these lame trash making it to the charts.

User Distributed Content- 41% As one can expect there were 7 different 9/11 related clips, from footages of these horrendous moments and different comments/analyses etc.

An ever-present trend is the Asian TV videos, most of them are completely beyond my comprehension. Like last time, if someone can explain the meaning of this, or this or this, I’ll be immensely grateful.

There were 8 sports related video with a strong dominancy to old South American football, once again, clarification is welcome. The rest where just abundant of recycled stuff that people find funny, topical, scary or enchanting enough to cut and uploaded for us to enjoy. Here again there is also an immature trend of viewer-generating manipulations. These usually shout "the original this" or "the official that" or the "unseen of that" when a story like Steve Irwin stirs the media and simple rules of demand creates several replicas of the same piece in the chart. (last week I looked at the same chart and found 12 (!) replicas of the stingray incedent in the first 20 videos…

Commercial -8%  We can see the maturing trend of TV and Movies trailers. It seems like cable TV and Hollywood studios and their marketing directors realize how perfect a marketing tool YT can be for them and setting up proper channels. (e.g. 1, 2). They even start to experiment with YT as a channell for consumer participation projects. kudos for that.

Additional commercial trend is product demonstrations. There was this impressive LEGO creation which I couldn’t tell if been uploaded by LEGO or by an enthusiastic fan from LEGO community of fans, and this beautiful demonstration of Canon enhancing software – its a fantastic example of marketing comms on YT. As I go over this report before posting, this also got into the charts. 

Right…as usual this report is getting too long and exhaustive so its time to conclude. See you back in a month or so where I’ll go under the skin of the most subscribed to channels in YT. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and please leave a comment if you want to suggest anything that can improve these reports.