NBC.com’s The Office, whose Streamy Award winning companion series Subtle Sexuality garnered both critical acclaim and great viewership turnout, has a new web series up its sleeve: The 3rd Floor, a ‘self-produced’ horror film created by The Office character Ryan Howard (B.J. Novak).
We’ve always been a little skeptical about sponsored online video contests with cash payouts, especially when the decision on the winner is in the brand’s hands. But when Kia Motors launched its Who’s Next? reality web series to find the next YouTube star, we took interest. This one didn’t have nameless judges, but instead tapped well known YouTube creators SMOSH, LisaNova and ShayCarl to sift through all the submissions of would-be stars.
Today they picked a winner. Down to two finalists, it was Travis Betz, creator of the channel The Receptionist on YouTube, who walked away with the oversized prize check for $10,000. The campy final episode of the reality series is above, complete with LisaNova hamming it up as an overdressed reality show hostess—proving the YouTubers still keep it loose and weren’t turning stiff corporate shills just for a paycheck.
Facebook continues its head-turning upward trajectory in online video, firmly taking over the second place spot to Google sites (YouTube) in comScore’s latest report on online video in the US released today. The data for August 2010 shows that the social networking site delivered 243 million video streams—or as they call them ‘viewing sessions’—to an estimated 58.6 million unique viewers that month. Last August Facebook barely made the chart, coming in at number 10 with just 24 million viewers.
It was enough to see Facebook leap over Yahoo! sites, which is now in third place with 229 million viewing sessions to 53.9 million viewers. Music video powerhouse VEVO isn’t slacking either, serving up 205 million sessions to 45.4 million viewers.
The overall consumption numbers for online video show steady growth once again, with 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 14.3 hours per viewer. That’s about an 11% year over year growth from last August in terms of total viewers.
Full chart below:
Two to three years ago, there were a handful of women on YouTube making videos centered on beauty, makeup, and style. Today, there are six makeup/beauty gurus in the top 100 most subscribed to YouTube channels of all time (michellephan’s the most popular, currently holding #18 spot).
The unexpected and astronomical success of the makeup guru community is one of the best stories on YouTube, especially for the content creators who acquire brand deals (like michellephan, who signed with Lancome) and are sent massive amount of free makeup/skin care products. Add to the makeup gurus thousands of other guru content creators who are racking up millions of views, and it’s easy to see the guru community on YouTube has grown so big it rivals the passion and size of YouTube’s comedy community (which most people probably thought was YouTube’s only community).
Now there is a third YouTube community that’s risen to rival both the comedy and guru crowd. And that community is gaming.
While machinima has been on YouTube since 2006 and been a dominant force on the site for years (it’s currently YouTube’s #1 most viewed channel of all time), until recently, there’s been no other noticeable success stories for the gaming community. The obvious exception to this is LikeTotallyAwesome, a creation sxephil launched in Fall of 2009. With his contacts, sxephil was able to partner, license and put together a successful gaming channel in the same style as machinima. Yet no one else was able to duplicate his success. Until now. The gaming community is currently exploding in massive ways rivaling the numbers of long established YouTubers.
But why did it take so long? How did machinima and LikeTotallyAwesome attain YouTube popularity? Why did other gaming channels, despite good numbers and fan support from a $60 billion worldwide video game industry, not reach any kind of comparable mainstream YouTube success?
There are a few reasons. First, it has to do with the style of the content.
Despite being part of a $60 billion worldwide industry, gaming content is still niche. Yes, makeup content is very niche, too, but it was able to explode because YouTube success is personality driven. People who would never care about makeup or beauty found themselves becoming instant fans of those creating the content. A lot of the gurus are great in front of the camera. Some are easy on the eyes, but it’s not just that. The voice, tone, personality, knowhow, and overall presentation of a lot of the gurus make them easily watchable and very likable, regardless of whatever it is their guru-ing about.
This is exactly why the gaming community is currently exploding. People who would never care about gaming watch one a video from one of gaming’s many genres (news, reviews, and lets play – entire walkthroughs of a video game) and find themselves mesmerized by the content while simultaneously being drawn to the voice, tone, personality, knowhow, and stories of the content creators.
A second reason gaming recently came into mainstream YouTube success is that it reached a tipping point.
One can’t overestimate the size of the worldwide gaming community, and once enough of that community decided to make YouTube its hub, everyone else seemed to follow. Where sites like IGN were previously the focal point for gaming videos, news, and reviews, YouTube is emerging as another player, providing fans an easy way to put out and popularize their own content.
Another reason gaming is blowing up at such an accelerated rate is an awesome side effect of the FarmVille phenomenon.
At its heart, FarmVille is a video game, and it’s becoming the “gateway drug” of gaming. It hooks people into the gaming experience. Then they crave more. Users click towards the easiest way to get their fix, which is the traditional console and computer gaming scene, which can quickly lead to participation in the industry’s biggest genre, competitive gaming, which is effectively turning into a sport. Users upload videos of themselves competing against others in multiplayer games, like Starcraft 2 and Modern Warfare 2.
But what’s biggest reason that YouTube’s gaming community is only now coming into its own? You guessed it! Laws and politics. Tune in tomorrow for an explanation.
Brokerage firm TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation launched its own financial advice web series The Invested Life on the Money section of MSN.com today. The reality television-formatted series is hosted by familiar Onion News Network anchor Suzanne Sena, who tells us:
“In these times of economic uncertainty, we want to give you the tools to take control of your financial future. So we went out and found people just like you and matched them up with some of the most well respected financial coaches from across the country—with one goal in mind: helping you manage portfolio, and reaching your retirement goals.”
There’s this scene in Episode 5 of the first season of Mad Men. Freddy Rumsen, one of the good old boys of the 1960′s fraternity that was the American advertising industry, is talking with his boss, Don Draper and Art Director, Salvatore Romano. Rumsen recounts how he wrangled all the secretaries in the office into an observation room and had them try on Belle Jolie lipstick so he could get ideas for an ad campaign. While most of the other girls fluttered about doing whatever it was women who were suffocated by the feminine mystique and a lack of upward workplace mobility did, Peggy Olson actually came up with a helluva catchphrase. Rumsen was truly amazed. He tells Draper and Romano, “It was like watching a dog play the piano.”
That’s how I think we think about old people.
Our platonic ideal of octogenarians is either all “Get off my lawn!” or sweet and loving elders whose mere presence commands a certain amount of respect or arthritic, semi-senile individuals needing constant attention or some combination of the three. When eightysomethings act outside these expectations – whether it’s by hosting SNL, making sketch comedy ripe with sexual innuendo, riffing on the Jersey Shore, or telling dirty jokes – we like it. A lot.
And that’s part of why Stiller & Meara works. The other part is they’re hysterical.
Yahoo’s latest original web series is created, directed, and produced by Ben Stiller under the banner of Red Hour Films. The show stars his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara in a kind of redux of the couple’s popular, long-acclaimed comedy routine. Early graduates of Second City, the husband and wife duo are seasoned vets at the art of improv. It shows.
In the first two installments, Stiller and Meara exchange the kind of banter about the internet and the Jersey Shore only 40+ years of comedy training and companionship can produce. It’s a gentle ribbing, complete with jokes about ovulation and kids these days, built on top of an almost tangible foundation of genuine affection. It’s also way more entertaining than any dog playing the piano. This is definitely one web series to watch.
Jim Louderback is a vocal critic of the current state of ‘views’ in online video. In a guest column in AdAge today, Louderback, who’s also the CEO of Revision3, continued to lambast the industry for rampant misrepresentatation of viewership counts on videos. The worst culprit of all? The dreaded embedded autoplay.
“And recently I’ve come to find the off-site—or embedded autoplay—as a particularly heinous malodorous video view,” he writes. “Why? Because many embedded autoplay videos often get streamed to pages that have zero content relationship to the video served, and often play below the fold with audio turned off.”
The timing of this conicides with TubeMogul releasing today an updated version of their “What Counts As a View” study that breaks down the varying threshold of the major video sites. The overall conclusion was that the views threshold has in fact become less stringent that their original 2008 study. Blip.tv still stands as the most stringent, counting only one view per IP address per session, whereas sites like YouTube and Yahoo Video are much more liberal in what counts.
EMBEDDED AUTOPLAY
We’ve been against the concept of embedded autoplay here at Tubefilter as well, especially when the networks or creators turn around and pitch us their web series that is allegedly a “hit” with millions of views, even when they are really counting all those autoplaying paid views. Remember when we caught MySpace buying views for their game show series BFF?
Two weeks ago, Disney Online and the The Jim Henson Company announced Chef Cat Cora would leave the hallowed halls of Kitchen Stadium at least once a week to star in a pair of online, muppet cooking shows. Today, the two progenitors of modern family-friendly programming announced another web series that’s safe for work and fun for the kids.
The Possibility Shop is back for a second season. Created by and starring “every family’s Aha-inspiring guru,” Courtney Watkins, the series attempts to engage with mothers and inspire them with a DIY spirit and “how to, can do” attitude. In every installment, the modestly dressed and impossibly upbeat Watkins embarks on an everyday creative project, including “designing and building a haunted house, offering instructions for a make-your-own board game, jump starting a conversation, or finding ways to carry the spirit of the holidays throughout the entire year.”
The 20-episode second season will run through August 2011 with The Clorox Company as The Possibility Shop’s exclusive sponsor. In addition to branding on The Possibility Shop website, Clorox, Glad, Brita, and more of the company’s products will be featured in a quick and easy companion series dubbed Bright Ideas. Moms fresh out of ways to keep their kid entertained and in need of information on a suite of household cleaning products should tune in.
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