Tubefilter News

We’ve explored online video from a ton of angles during our most recent Tubefilter Meetups. We’ve discussed how YouTube and its Partner Program program have opened a clear path to online video monetization. And as we’ve learned from our Beyond YouTube event, advertising revenue share on YouTube is just the tip of the iceberg. Producers are maximizing their online video businesses with their own websites, platforms like Blip.tv, smartphone apps, merchandising, licensing, flavored carbonated beverages and more.

Being a successful online video producer is about being both a creator and a marketer. And in our Social Video on Steroids panel, the experts shared how to engage and drive audiences using best practices in social media marketing and promotion.

Now it’s time to discuss another component of online video.

Join us now, LIVE, as we explore the seedy underworld of “cheating” – a controversial practice among online video producers that may or may not even exist. We’ll be surveying the most ingenious techniques in use to draw more eyeballs to your content and decide whether they qualify as “cheating” or “ingenious.

There are a select few online video networks that have been inducted into the elite Billion Views Club. Machinima is one of them. And now the distributor of content geared towards young male video game enthusiasts garners enough pairs of eyeballs worldwide to make it a member of said elite club month after month after month.

Machinima announced this week over “116 million unique gamers viewed in excess of 1.11 billion videos in November 2011.” 277,330,000 of those views came from 17,750,000 individuals living in the United States who tuned into Machinima’s programming on YouTube. The other 822.6+ million views came from Machinima’s global YouTube audience, as well as those watching Machinima on its various worldwide distribution platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, iOS, and Android.

One reason why Machinima’s been able to command such a massive audience is because of its YouTube channel with over 3.8 million subscribers. Another reason is it makes and distributes some great content.

Web Therapy is an original web series from Lisa Kudrow, Don Roos, Dan Bucatinsky, Lexus’ LStudio, and Intelligent Life Productions. Its fourth online season debuted in November, and features Kudrow’s overcompensating, insecure, and not-so-friendly Fiona Wallace conduct short-form therapy sessions by way of video chat with an array of celebrities making in-character and not-in-character cameos. Conan O’Brien, for instance, appears as an exaggerated and angry version of himself while Rosie O’Donnell plays an editor at a literary agency in charge of making Wallace’s new memoir awesome.

O’Brien and O’Donnell make their cameos online, but will also make them on a premium cable television channel in the near future. Showtime today announced it’s picked up a second season of Web Therapy.

Showtime debuted a 10-episode half-hour version of the program back in July. The television version of Web Therapy is based on the internet version, but with new original footage shot just for the other small screen. Kudrow had this to say about the news:

“We are thrilled that Showtime will air more of the half-hour format of Web Therapy, we really love this version of the show…Of course, we are over the moon that Meryl Streep will be in this coming season. She was effortlessly hilarious, and it’s a great story. We have Lily Tomlin back who always fantastically funny. Conan O’Brien is beyond, fantastic, he’s a perfect improviser. We’re honestly giddy over the people we have for this season.”

David Wain is a catnip amongst a class of comedy nerds of the Best Week Ever generation, who grew up on bootlegged VHS copies of The State and followed the troupe’s subsequent diaspora into Viva Variety, Reno 911, and Stella. But you don’t need to be able to to recite Wet Hot American Summer by heart or fully understand what it means to be a comedy trio powered by the premise of “Ids in suits” to find him entertaining. Wain can be funny for everyone.

That’s why the internet at large should join Michael Ian black in being all jazz hands about the Season 5 premiere of Wainy Days.

The My Damn Channel original web series starring, created, and written by Wain first debuted n 2007. It’s storyline hasn’t changed much since. Each installment features an exaggerated version of the now 42-year-old Wain – who works in a kind of tenement sewing sweat shop and lives in brownstone Brooklyn – on a perpetually unfulfilled quest to satisfy his sex drive with an array of attractive celebrity guest stars.

For Season 5, those objects of Wain’s affection, and the individuals who oftentimes get in the way of and/or steal those objections of affection include: Ken Marino (Childrens Hospital, Party Down), Steven Weber (Falling Skies, Wings), Lizzy Caplan (Party Down, True Blood), Erinn Hayes (Childrens Hospital, Parenthood), Jorma Taccone (Saturday NightLive, The Lonely Island), Zandy Hartig (Childrens Hospital) and Thomas Lennon (The State, Reno 911).

But Wain has one more very special guest star and companion for the latest season of Wainy Days. The new 2012 Fiat 500. The Italian automobile manufacturer is sponsoring the program’s entire six-episode fifth season, and gets a significant amount of inconspicuous and tongue-in-cheek product placement screen time in the series.

Now is you last chance to get the last remaining tickets for the highly-anticipated Tubefilter Meetup on creative online video marketing!

It’s time to get dirty.

Join us as we explore the seedy underworld of “cheating”—a controversial practice among online video producers. What is cheating? Is it really wrong? Where do you draw the line?

We’ll be surveying the most ingenious techniques in use and decide whether they qualify as “cheating” or not. By discussing and defining “cheating” we can more successfully identify the industry’s best practices in online video distribution. It is our top priority to ensure Tubefilter continues to be a platform for constructive dialogue and a safe environment for opposing views of both attendees and panelists.

From category jacking and bait-and-switches, to alliances and straight-up bribery, we’re going to get down and dirty with some of the worst (or best) offenders.

You won’t want to miss this.

Panelists:

Benny and Rafi Fine, TheFineBros
These YouTube veterans, whose channel is ranked #36 Most Subscribed Channel of All Time and #12 Most Subscribed Comedians of All Time, boast an encyclopedic knowledge of the wide-open opportunities on Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube itself that video producers exploit to pump up views and subscribers.

William Hyde, TheWillofDC
A dedicated YouTube Partner since 2009, Will is an expert in creative video marketing and has earned the title “Sheriff of YouTube” among fans. His weekly news shows YouTube News and YouTube Winners and Losers feature the latest on the YouTube Community with a focus on the top 100 YouTube Channels of All Time.

Moderator: Drew Baldwin, Tubefilter
Drew is the Co-Founder of Tubefilter and Executive Producer of the Streamy Awards.

This year we’ve been exploring how YouTube and its partner program have opened a clear path to online video monetization.

As we’ve learned from our contentious Beyond YouTube event, advertising revenue share on YouTube is just the tip of the iceberg: producers are maximizing their online video business with their own websites, platforms like Blip.tv, smartphone apps, merchandising, licensing, and more.

Being a successful online video producer is about being both a creator and a marketer. And in our Social Video on Steroids, the experts shared how to engage and drive audiences using best practices in social media marketing and promotion.

Sponsored by King of the Web, a place to discover and reward internet awesome.

YouTube unveiled a new layout yesterday. Like the reaction to the new studio set of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from back in 2005, opinions on the design are mixed. But that’s really no surprise.

Over 160 million people in the United States alone visit YouTube on a monthly basis. It can be a frustrating experience when something which that many individuals are readily familiar with undergoes drastic change. Like I described during my analysis of the new design when it was called codename Cosmic Panda, YouTube is like the remote control for the internet. And whenever the video sharing site changes its format, it’s akin to going over to your friend’s house and trying to operate their television when you both have different cable service providers. Aggravating, amiright?

But before we get into the if and how YouTube’s new layout has aggravated YouTubers, let’s briefly go over the changes. Here are some explanations straight from the source:

So, now that we’re familiar with the new YouTube, let’s look at the overall reaction from the YouTubers most affected by the change. The response can be broken down into three general categories.

Subscriber Pruning
YouTube’s new Subscription Manager makes it extremely easy to navigate through all of your channel subscriptions and unsubscribe to any you no longer watch. This means a ton of YouTubers are bleeding subscribers. There are two general reactions to this new phenomenon.

One, it kinda sucks. The status and popularity of a YouTube channel isn’t really defined by its number of aggregate views (though a high number there certainly helps), but by the number of its subscribers. It takes a lot to get an individual to click on that subscribe button (Editor’s Plug: By the way, have you subscribed to our Tubefilter channel?), and it can be extremely disheartening when you see them click it again to unsubscribe, especially when it’s en masse.

Two, it’s kinda good. Online video consumers now have a much better idea of all the YouTube they’re signed up to consume. They can now more effectively prune or add to their list of subscriptions. A simple way to unsubscribe may actually be a good thing because it (ideally) means those subscription numbers will not be drastically inflated and will have more meaningd.

Lucas Cruikshank’s first major motion picture debuted on Nickelodeon in September 2010. The movie is based on Cruikshank’s uber-popular and readily detested YouTube series Fred, was adapted for television by “entertainment management, media and content production company” The Collective, and stars the hyperactive, high pitched, prepubescent, Judy-crushin’, six-year-old titular character Fred Figglehorn. Its television premiere drew 7.6 million viewers, which made it basic cable’s top TV movie in the year of its release with the kids demographic.

Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred is Fred: The Movie’s sequel. It debuted on Nickelodeon in October 2011 and drew an audience of 5.7 million viewers. That was enough for the powers that be at Nick to order a third installment, along with a 20-episode Fred series to boot.

Nellie Andreeva at Deadline reports Nickelodeon will first shoot that 20-episode Fred series (which will be comprised of 11-minute installments) and then premiere Fred 3 on the basic cable channel shortly thereafter. Varsity Pictures and The Collective (the two companies that partnered on the first Fred film), are on board to produce both the series and the movie.

Live interactive horror project Killcam: Live has added over 1.1 million viewers to its rapidly growing “Killmunity.”

The project, directed by John Darko, debuted on October 31st and runs through the end of the year. Killcam: Live stars April Wade, Ben Begley, Tracy Clifton, Derrick Oliver, Sam Weller, Emily Dykes, Diahnna Nicole Baxter, Billy Towers, Mirai Booth-Ong, and Rolence Patugan. Killcam: Live is the brain child of Wade and filmmaker Canyon Prince.

n Killcam: Live, viewers across the world interact directly with the characters in the ongoing storyline, changing the way audiences are interacting with entertainment programming. Audiences have already witnessed the (fictional) brutal killings of three of the story’s main characters and one surprise death. Some viewers become characters in the story itself, and others participate in “Cill Contests” in which they rip footage from the live and narrative story into their own recap videos.

The project follows a group of students as they willingly agree to participate in a social experiment put on by their charming psychology professor Michael Grayson (played by J. Michael Briggs). The experiment is meant to explore the effects of current human dependence on technology and social media as the majority form of communication. During the ongoing experiment, the students will be isolated from each other and their only way to communicate with the outside world will be through social media. However, someone has a different agenda in mind as things start to take a turn for the worse.

New narrative episodes come out Thursdays, with 72-hour live segments during which audiences will be able to inform the characters (in real time) what is happening and possibly even aid them in their escape (or demise)

“We are looking to bring a heightened level of interactivity to the audience” says Wade, “and we feel that this projects is on the cutting edge of a new age of storytelling. As filmmakers today, we have an international platform for our stories that never existed before and I am thrilled to be experimenting with creative ways to use social media to shape the film.”

Prince adds, “We’re moving farther and farther away from a traditional storytelling model. As people continue to consume more and more content via mobile devices, it’s detrimental and entirely counter-productive for us not to take advantage of the enormous opportunities that interactive multiple screen storytelling opens up.”

With only four weeks remaining before the finale, now is the time to catch up!