Tubefilter News

Adam Corolla joins the CollegeHumor gang as the latest guest on CH’s original web series Star of The Week. The series has been steadily gaining steam over the past month, garnering over 2 million views since its launch in mid-October.

Ashton Kutcher is the official President of Pop Culture. The actor-slash-enterepreneur-slash-twitterer (who now has over 6 million followers and counting) received the title in June 2010 after purchasing a minority stake in Popchips Inc.

The company makes a healthy heat and pressurized alternative to your average fried or baked potato chip. And Kutcher thinks it’s delicious. He explained his decision to invest in the three-year-old San Francisco-based snack-food maker to Suzanne Vranica at the Wall Street Journal in the following terms:

Listen, I’m going to eat these chips anyway.…If I can, why not actually own a piece of the company…As my image is being leveraged, I am participating in the upside.

Money wasn’t the only part of the deal. Kutcher’s Popchips investment was contingent on three conditions. He wanted to be President of Pop Culture, oversee the social media for the brand, and have access to an endless supply of popchips for his family and friends.

What has the 32-year-old done with his new position and as many Popchips as he can eat? Create some very good branded content.

Kutcher’s latest video promoting Popchips is a straight-up, spot-on spoof of the celebrity-obsessed, paparazzi-fueled, frenetic magazine TV show, TMZ. Kutcher plays the role of the tabloid’s creator and managing editor, Harvey Levin, constantly gnawing on a straw while listening to his staff report on all the fresh celebrity dirt. Aside from a few funny pot shots, the only differences between Kutcher’s version and the original are the show is called Pop and, instead of celebrities, it covers the lives of those employed by TMZ.

Pop camera crews follow TMZ talent and catch them on tape in mundane situations. What’s uncanny is how the TMZ talent reacts. Awkward, annoyed, mostly unresponsive, and caught off guard. In other words, exactly how celebrities act when they’re caught on camera by TMZ.

Levin and company seem like smart people. You’d think they’d possess enough self-awareness to realize at some point, given the nature of their jobs, someone is going to shove a camera in their face. And you’d think they would have thought about this a lot and maybe even planned for when it happens! And you’d think they’d at least have something special for the occasion, maybe a zinger or two or a fake “I hate you and your mother! I’m going to smash your lens, set the SD card on fire, and eat your children!” kinda freakout. But no, they act just like Mel Gibson. Fortunately, it still makes for great online video.

Plans are underway for a second season of Starburst-backed web series MTV Unplugged, the revival of MTV’s landmark television series that debuted in 1989.

One of my favorite online choose your own adventures is the George Romero-inspired entertainment experience The Outbreak. The undead action puts you in control of a middle-aged white guy who’s trapped in a backwoods house along with a token girl, the cocky badass, the creepy guy, and the injured one. You’re all attempting to stave off undead intruders and survive the zombie apocalypse. Make one wrong move and your brains are for dinner.

The Outbreak comes from interactive design firm SilkTricky and is a fantastic addition to the new media archives of zombie entertainment. But how’s it hold up against one of the genre’s progenitors?

Night of the Living Dead is arguably the greatest zombie flick of all time. The film debuted in 1968, is directed by zombie king George Romero, and inspired a franchise at least two remakes and six Living Dead movies long. It’s also owned by you and me.

Due to copyright law and a distributor’s snafu, Night of the Living Dead entered the public domain, which means you can watch the whole movie on Google Video, and creative online video types can remake the movie into an online, interactive choose your own adventure game.

Editing the Dead severs Night of the Living Dead into a handful of installments, each concluding with an action you, the viewer must take. Turn on those lights! Go in the house! Do you stay in the car or get the hell out of Dodge? It lacks the complicated decision trees utilized by more modern choose your adventure creators, but if it’s been a few years since you’ve gotten your Living Dead fix, it’s a great way to watch the movie. It’s also a fantastic simulation to help you hone your zombie escape plan.

Hulu delivered over one billion ads in October. That headline news yesterday after comScore released the latest incarnation of its monthly online video charts. But what else can we take away from comScore’s U.S. Online Video Rankings? With a calculator and eighth grade algebra, you can figure out a handful of great statistics.

How about how often viewers see video ads?

The average Hulu viewer watched 207.8 minutes of online video in October. Hulu delivered 1.1 billion ads at a rate of 38.1 ads per viewer. If you take the minutes of online video per viewer, and divide that by the frequency of video ads per viewer, you find your everyday consumer of Hulu watches one video ad every five minutes and 27 seconds.

That may seem like a lot of advertising, but the numbers isn’t all that surprising. Your regular, 22-minute television sitcom schedules an ad break roughly once every six minutes. Most Hulu users visit Hulu to watch on-demand TV. The timing of commercial breaks inserted into television shows stays constant, regardless of the viewing platform. So, it makes sense for you watch an ad on Hulu about as often as you see a commercial break on TV.

What makes less sense is how often you view a video ad on YouTube.

The average YouTube viewer watched 271.6 minutes of online video. YouTube delivered 170 million ads at a frequency of 4.1 ads per viewer. Take those stats and you find your everyday consumer of YouTube watches one video ad every 66 minutes and 14 seconds. That’s not a lot of advertising!

The advertising frequency gap between Hulu and YouTube has a lot to do with a financial problem YouTube’s struggled with since its inception: amateur content. Unless you’re an uploader who is part of YouTube’s Partner Program, ads aren’t going to appear within your videos. The vast majority of the 35 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute comes in the form of homemade movies shot by amateurs, against which YouTube can’t advertise. To be the biggest online video site in the world means having a helluva lot of inventory that doesn’t make you money.

Hulu’s the exact opposite. All of its content comes from premium providers and is advertiser friendly. The same brands comfortable advertising on broadcast NBC also feel okay throwing ad dollars Hulu’s way.

Long-form videos also comprise the majority of Hulu’s inventory and present more advertising opportunities. People who watch installments of The Office on Hulu are going to tune in until they’re finished, and suffer through the two or three commercial breaks it takes to get to the end of an episode. An episode of The Guild lasts nine minutes on YouTube, and you only have to watch one commercial when it starts.

Looking at these numbers it’s no surprise Hulu’s been able to turn a profit within its first year of operations while YouTube’s still not quite in the black. I realize there are many idiosyncrasies involved with running a multi-billion dollar media corporation, but if Eric Schmidt and company can focus on increasing the frequency that YouTube viewers watch video ads, it may be the quickest way to help the company’s bottom line.

The lexicographers at the New Oxford American Dictionary developed an ingenious way to make books of word meanings remain culturally relevant.

Every year, the architects and keepers of the definitive record of the English language compile a short list of words of particular popular significance that are in the running for Word of the Year.
“Unfriend” took home top honors in 2009, beating out “hashtag,” “sexting,” “death panel,” and “tramp stamp.” Sarah Palin made up the word that won this year.

“Refudiate” is of the former Governer of Alaska’s own mis-invention. It’s a verb “used loosely to mean ‘reject’” that first appeared in a Twitter message from SarahPalinUSA. Nick Bilton at the New York Times describes its etymology as a mashing up of “‘refute’ and ‘repudiate,’ while trying to say something like ‘reject.’”

The list of words refudiated by the New Oxford American Dictionary for the 2010 Word of the Year include “retweet,” “Tea Party,” “top kill,” and “webisode.”

Now, I’m not suggesting that when group of word compilation scientists include “webisode” on a list of culturally relevant terms it signifies web series have finally floated into popular culture’s mainstream. But it does say something. It doesn’t herald mass acceptance and consumption of a new entertainment medium, and I don’t want to attach too much weight to a selection that appears on the same list as the word “gleek” (noun (informal) a fan of the television series Glee), but if a group of word compilation scientists believe “webisde” is as culturally relevant as “vuvuzela,” I think it means the popular conception of web series, web shows, and online video is at least headed in the right direction.

Actress and stand-up comedian Whitney Cummings hosts a brand web series presented by Lexus: Darkcasting, a late night talk show that takes place inside Lexus’ all-new premium compact hybrid, the CT 200h.

Hulu’s on pace to gross over $250 million in advertising revenue in 2010 (which is very close to my estimates using fuzzy math back in July).

How does the NBC, FOX, and ABC joint-venture for online, time-shifted television and movie viewing generate that much cash? Two reasons. First, it has a lot of advertising clients. Hulu CEO, Jason Kilar told the audience at NewTeeVee Live the site had 352 advertisers in Q3 alone. Second, it delivers a lot of ads.

The latest comScore numbers indicate Hulu delivered 1,109,899,000 ads in October. That’s twice as much as Tremor Media’s 533,201,000, which ranks second on the monthly charts. It’s a huge increase for Hulu, whose advertising numbers are up nearly 40% since September due in large part to Fall’s new television lineup.

Hulu’s traffic numbers, however, have remained constant. 29,650,000 unique visitors went to Hulu.com in October, down from 29,890,000 last month. But that smaller amount of uniques watched forty more minutes of content (207.8 minutes up from 162.6 minutes) and watched over 11 more ads per viewer (38.1 ads up from 27.5).

Google sites still dominated the traditional online video rankings.

Like Hulu, Google’s unique visitor numbers stayed relatively constant at 146,346,000. But the sites’ number of viewing sessions reached a new high, crossing the 2 billion threshold to total 2,019,298,000 (a monthly gain of 6%). Google also experienced and increase in minutes per viewer, clocking in at 271.6 (a 4% gain since September).

Viacom and Vevo also shot up rankings to take the number three and four spots behind Yahoo, while Facebook, Microsoft, and Fox Interactive all dropped in the charts.