Tubefilter News

Six million subscribers, one billion combined views: last Wednesday The Digitour came to the Tubefilter Meetup, and they brought it. Hard.

Live stream views topped 55,000 on Tubefilter’s Stickam page during the panel, as viewers connected to the live chat through the Tubefilter Twitter feed.

Web superstars and Digitour performers Dave Days, DeStorm, and MysteryGuitarMan, along with Executive Producer Sarah Evershed of The Cloud Media, shared insights learned from the tour, the highs and lows, lessons learned and surprising successes.

You can watch the complete panel discussion below, but here are some highlights:

Lawrence, Kansas boasted the biggest turnout with the wildest fans
Cash sales were high, as younger fans lined up to buy tickets with their allowance money
Attendees ranged from toddlers to the elderly
Collaboration and cross-promotion was as crucial to success on stage as it is online
Converting an online audience isn’t automatic—performers had to hit the streets and pass out flyers and stage stunts to compliment their social marketing campaigns
Take a look at the wonderful photos from Bernie Su on the Tubefilter Facebook page.

A special thanks to our Meetup Sponsor Openfilm, which launched the Are U The Next Web Celeb? Contest from the Tubefilter Meetup. The contest boasts a $20,000 prize to take your web series to the next level.

Also a big thanks to our Community Sponsors SAG New Media, ValleyGirl.TV, and Blip.tv, who was on site demoing the newly designed website. And, of course, big ups to Dan Dominguez aka DJ SRSLY for providing the audio

What’s better than a gang of goofy puppet pirates leading the online masses on a Gooniesesque adventure through New York City’s five boroughs to find an honest to God buried treasure chest filled with $10,000 in gold coins? How about all of the above in addition to the knowledge said treasure chest is still at large.

The puppeteers behind the cryptic map to childhood fun and adult supplemental income, We Lost Our Gold released the eighth and final episode of the their original web series on September 10, 2010. The program tells the story of a crew of blundering swashbucklers who hid their fortunes only to forget the hiding place. Individuals are meant to watch the story, pick up the clues the pirates are laying down, and venture to some soft spot of earth somewhere in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, or The Bronx with shovels in tow to dig up a real life chest of coins. But no one’s done that last part yet.

While the treasure is still at large, the puppet masters behind the very expensive resume builder (it’s the creators’ own cash that’s buried in that chest) are looking to breathe new life into the hunt without revealing more clues. So, they stuck their hands into two of their old creations, Mario and Fafa the Groundhog, to keep their puppetry on point and get new and old viewers tuned in.

A $346 million global take so far, and the fourth-highest worldwide debut ever, should assuage some concerns in the Bruckheimer and Disney camps that they might have taken one too many trips to the Pirates well this past weekend. Its soft $90 million North American opening raised some plucked Hollywood eyebrows, but international fans don’t seem to mind that the franchise’s fool’s gold might be losing its luster.

Hence, it’s time for a good online video spoof to pop up. Sure, YouTube this weekend was awash with spoof videos of the mega-blockbuster—like the Family Guy dubbed version of the trailer—but what made waves in Hollywood circles was a crack at Jerry Bruckheimer himself. Filmmaker Nathan Gotsch whipped up the gem that is “Jerry Bruckheimer Pitch Meeting” and shortly thereafter the video popped up on Nikki Finke Friday, making the industry rounds.

“An exclusive look inside Jerry Bruckheimer Films…kind of.”

I once went to a Contemporary art auction at Sotheby’s. Not to buy anything, obv, but because private art collections are more or less private and auctions present the only opportunities one may get in a lifetime to stare and gape in mock, shock, and awe at a select group of historically significant and/or very pretty world famous paintings and photographs. Plus, they’re surreal affairs, phenomenon both fascinating and nauseating to witness. Unless your last name is Rockefeller or FancyPants, you’re rarely in a room with a few hundred individuals who count their money in stacks of millions.

If you want to experience it all firsthand, you can make your way to your local neighborhood international auction house on days when the hammer drops to watch all the hullabaloo and hobnob with high society (auctions are usually free to attend), or you can catch Christie’s In the Saleroom. The original web series delivers the action from the auction to a computer screen near you.

The latest installment features Christie’s auctioneer Christopher Burge entertaining a 16-minute bidding war for Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait, 1963-1964. The piece was originally commissioned in 1964 for $1,600. The final selling price came to $34.25 million, the most expensive lot in a very good night for Christie’s.

Farhad Manjoo is the resident tech and social media mores expert for online current affairs and cultural publication Slate. In addition to penning articles answering age old new media questions and modern hypotheticals, Manjoo also plays host on a SlateV web series about smartphone, web, and social media applications.

I know what you’re thinking. “Between The Daily App Show and Revision3’s AppJudgement I already have much too much of my time dedicated to original web series showcasing and explaining how to use third party applications on my iPhone. There aren’t enough minutes in my day for one more!” But I’d argue Manjoo’s concise, straightforward, and kinda funny explanations of the latest and greatest applications available, hand model cohost, and Lamda Lamda Lamda persona make Killer Apps one to watch.

Slate V releases Killer Apps episodes once every few weeks.

Hulu receives only 18% of the views of the online video behemoth that is YouTube (the exact numbers are 26,193,000 visitors to 142,720,000), but the on-demand streaming video destination for premium TV shows and movies delivers a helluva lot more ads.

According to the latest comScore numbers, Hulu delivered a total of 470 million minutes(!) of video ads in the month of April. That’s roughly 7.8 million days(!) and 21,461 years(!) worth of online video advertising. I would like to tell you how many millions of minutes of ads YouTube delivered last month, too, but whatever YouTube’s video ad numbers were, they don’t make comScore’s Top 10 list.

That 470 million minutes from Hulu may seem like an eternity, but it’s actually a 9% drop from March when the site delivered 520 million minutes of video advertising. At least part of the decline is due to a 5% or so drop in Hulu viewers, from 27.5 million last month to 26.1 million in April.

I used to go this meetup called the New York Open Coffee Club. Startup entrepreneurs, mostly denizens of, or visitors to NYCs then burgeoning and now established technology scene meet in the early AM and talk shop over cups of coffee and croissants. Discussions range from what’s going on in the cloud, to how that latest acquisition by that multi-million dollar online destination with VC cash to burn was over and/or undervalued, to how we’re all psyched that the future is all about crowd-sourced disruptive social couponing and that’s a cool thing for the future to be about.

Fun, right?! Kinda! But I stopped going. I’m all about talking to people about social tech, but at a certain point you cross the threshold from conversing about things interesting and innovative to things absurd. I ditched setting my alarm an hour early every Thursday morning to go to a networking event where guys like these are in the crowd.

The Startup Guys were conceived by CollegeHumor writers Josh Ruben and Streeter Seidell and do stellar job of both capturing and mocking the ridiculousness that can sometimes be the social media and tech scenes.

Just when you think Sesame Street is no longer palatable to an adult audience and has an entertainment flavor profile crafted especially for kids, the pop culturally hip and online video savvy individuals at the Sesame Workshop kick it up a notch.

BAM! There’s Cookie Monster auditioning for SNL. BAM! There’s Oscar the Grouch making his Oscar predictions. BAM! There’s Bert doing his best Charlie Rose impression interviewing Andy Samberg. (Sorry. I just watched this video of Emeril.)

That last one went live earlier today. Samberg tries to keep a straight face for five minutes and 20 seconds while sitting across from an animated puppet who talks about reading depressed Russian novelists and longing for 5th Century European footwear.

Bert’s no Zach Galifianakis or Michael Showalter, at leat not yet. But I’d still add Conversations with Bert to my list of Must Watch Online Original Faux Interview Series.