Short answer: Yes. Longerish answer: This post.
Special Delivery is what happens when you take the tired concept of Candid Camera comedy to the web, where the reins of production are handed to savvy young creatives with room to wax risqué, unhindered by stodgy networks and unbridled by 30-minute timeslots.
Launched in early march, the Frito-Lay/Cheetos-sponsored 18-episode MySpace series gets straight to the gotcha! punchline in 4 minutes or less. Handymen and delivery guys walk into squirmingly uncomfortable situations (an out-of-closet proposal gone wrong, pizza oriented obstacle courses, alien probes) to the delight of hundreds of thousands of viewers:
Errr…hundreds of thousands of viewers on MySpace. The same videos are up on YouTube, but nobody’s watching. As Silicon Alley Insider points out, “of the 12 episodes of Special Delivery added within the last month on YouTube, only one has more than 1,000 views. Meanwhile, episodes of Special Delivery found 254,778 viewers on last week and 155,011 the week before.”
Tubemogul says the discrepancy is due to differing demos. I disagree. This one’s all about being featured.
Yes, different sites have different communities. Facebook users are more socioeconomically advantaged and academically oriented than those on MySpace. Metafilter users leave grossly more valuable commentary than any annotation you’ll find on YouTube. But can MySpace users and YouTube users really be hundreds of thousands of views apart? Especially when watching a series that ostensibly looks palatable to both parties?
Special Delivery is a MySpace original, so the social network has been pimping the hell out of the show and featuring it in prominent locations on multiple occasions. YouTube hasn’t featured the series once. The difference in views is a strong indicator of how much promotional power these sites have.
There’s a commonly held conception that the internet is a meritocracy, that the cream will rise to the top. Let’s say Special Delivery is a fantastic show. Why isn’t it doing well on YouTube? Let’s say it’s terrible. Then why is it doing so well on MySpace?
Good or bad, MySpace’s muscle is making the series a relative hit, and it’s evidence of the increasing importance of being featured on the homepage of a major video-sharing site. Sure, everything on the web is easily accessible, only a click away, but prime real estate is the new primetime and integral to a show’s success in the new medium.
The only thing that hasn’t been democratized is marketing.
Comments
YES YES YES YES!!!!!!!!
Word is bond.
Democratized marketing examples? Digg?
you got it. its all about being featured!
wreck – good point. all those social news site could fall under the democratized marketing category one way or another.
Right on the money. Our series is carried by nearly every video site out there, and views are deep in the six figures for sites that feature us (which luckily has been most of them, though we’re still trying to get YouTube and MySpace to sit up and take notice), with great comments, high ratings, etc. For sites that don’t, we struggle to get our views into 3 figures. The paradigm hasn’t really changed since Loretta Lynn’s day: if the DJ plays your music you get famous. Only difference is the DJs have become web editors.
Thanks for pointing this out! I wrote the TubeMogul blog you link to and agree that being featured on MySpace explains much of the discrepancy in this case. I would add the caveat that, from the perspective of a content creator, distributing videos to multiple sites gives you more chances to be featured, in part because video site editors vary in taste and agendas (i.e. StupidVideos vs. Howcast) and demographics do often play into that decision. A pure meritocracy across sites is tough when there are billions of videos. In the data, we often see great content get buried, and certain shows/genres often get more views outside of YouTube.
Agree. YouTube users RactalFece, Frezned, WaverlyFlams, have all been amazing for years but had zero viewers until I got them featured on YouTube, now they all have roaring fan bases.
I agree with your points here. No matter which site – Being featured leads to more exposure which is clearly always a good thing, and as a result leads to more views, which then leads to more exposure, and views, etc. Its creates a snowball effect. I enjoyed this article.
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