YouTube – The Social Media Guru.

Have you even read my online internet blog? It’s mega-awesome.

You’ve probably already seen this, even though it was published just a week ago.

It’s had nearly two million views in the last week, over 6,000 comments on YouTube itself, and been plugged into 826 blog posts. Among its honours, it’s the #2 – Top Favourited (All Time) – Sport. If it weren’t for Susan Boyle, it would be top video global of the month. It’s almost perfect in its spreadability:

• expertly filmed and edited
• great soundtrack
• the guy totally rides a bicycle up a frickin’ tree! a tree!

There are two schools of stunt videos: ones that go horribly wrong and paens to skill. This definitely falls into the latter camp. If you read through the comments on YouTube, you’ll find the general tenor is:

I’m not going to hold myself back..
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THIS???
OMFG I HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT GOOD HANDLING OF BIKE EVER.
Dude you fuckin rock, hold it up!

Like the spate of parkour videos that appeared a couple of years ago, it’s not just about skill: it’s transgressive – this is not the sort of thing your mum would want you to do. The police would give you a good talking to, as well. Actually, I don’t want you to do it, either – the tree will win. It’s not robbery or beating people up, though. This is peaceful – but definitely not passive – resistance. It’s all about ignoring the boundaries society wants to put on you. Jumping over the fence rather than going round it.

It’s also a film about being solitary: generally there’s no-one around but Danny, and where there are people they don’t get close, or even appear to notice. When they do notice – as with the closing shot, where he jumps off the bridge – by the time they’ve reacted, he’s gone. Especially interesting since one of the commentators says that he’s fairly well-known around Edinburgh and “always draws a big crowd”.

I suspect these latter two points speak very directly to the people who are spreading the film. This is a rebellion articulated through actions, not words.

At the same time, it’s very Scottish – or British. There’s a tone of grace, understatement and humility. The setting is the nice part of Edinburgh, not the ‘hood. There aren’t the fast edits and flash effects you’re used to in a stunts video. You aren’t listening to aggressive hip-hop or grindcore; you’re listening to a slow ballad called The Funeral. The guy doesn’t even speak, let alone brag or give us some nonsense about dedication and spirituality. And the video starts with him falling off the fence – twice, rather than a parade of victories. At 4:10, notice as he goes back and closes the gate he’s just jumped over – that’s a British stuntman for you.

Like most interesting things, it’s a mass of contradictions.

Anyway, well-done to Danny MacAskill and Dave Sowerby and also to Inspired Bicycles who sponsored them.

As I am sure you know, the plot is that the videotapes at the store run by Mike (Mos Def) and friend Jerry (Black) are accidentally wiped. They decide to remake the movies themselves in order to avoid getting in trouble with the store’s owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Baker).

Surprisingly, the neighbourhood takes kindly to these homemade remakes, thanks to their authenticity, and… but that would spoil it. The remakes are retitled as ’sweded’- hence the title of this post.

The movie is fun and has some memorable moments: well worth 100 minutes of your life. It’s a sentimental story, though, and, frankly, I don’t think that it could happen in real life.

In real life, raising the initial funding would be really easy but gaining community support would be a massive challenge. Almost the opposite of the film’s premise.

Community, home-grown video projects are typically created because there’s funding available from agencies like RDAs (Regional Development Agencies). They do some stuff. No-one outside the project cares, the project leaders only care because of the funding, and once the funding money is spent, they generally die away. They are supply-driven. Some bright spark in Whitehall or somewhere comes up with the idea of a community creative project and throws a couple of million at it. They haven’t bothered to survey the landscape and so it stumbles at the first hurdle, getting anyone interested.

Agencies leap at the chance of delivering to this non-existent demand, and come up with all kinds of reasons why yes, it really is out there on the street because that couple of million sounds pretty sweet. They have probably failed to deliver on a couple of projects like this before, but they do know how to write a tender document. The creative industries are rife with this shit.

As we all know, successful projects are driven by demand. And so, is there a demand for sweded video community or even a sweded commercial project? The geek demand I know about. The star wars pixellated remake (link) and sweded Doctor Who are out there, but I don’t know about mainstream stuff.

Is there sweded Desperate Housewives?

[SPOILER]

In the movie, the protagonists are eventually slammed by copyright lawyers and have to come up with their own material. I am not a lawyer and so I am not sure of the legality of that. I believe pastiche and parody allows some protection.

I was totally taken by surprise by this one.

(A little further research has revealed that it was created by WCRS, and that there is some controversy over the originality of the idea. What a shame.)

Well, today, the BBC publishes research that suggests the contrary:

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

And online and mobile viewing is rising – three quarters of users said they now watched more than they did a year ago.

But online video viewers are still in the minority, with just 9% of the population saying they do it regularly.

Another 13% said they watched occasionally, while a further 10% said they expected to start in the coming year.

So what does that mean? Is internet video good for TV viewing figures, like CBS said, or bad, like the BBC says?

In part, the answer may lie in the methodology employed. Asking people what they do does not return the same results as measuring what they really do. People try to please researchers, and they represent themselves as the person they want to be. They might also not really know where their time goes.

There’s another way of reconciling the results. It also might mean that our television viewing is becoming more filtered. Internet fans are watching less, but they are watching more of the shows that create a buzz on the net. It’s the long tail of television that’s suffering not the fat head of the Simpsons, Family Guy, the Daily Show and the other top YouTube favourites.

Elsewhere: Michael Urlocker discusses how the broadcast business might respond to this disruption. Antony Mayfield thinks the trend will continue.

Some edited highlights from the section covering what happened after the deception was uncovered, which was the last time I read anything about this. Notable is the complete failure of the mainstream media to cope with the phenomenon:

No backlash

Many assumed the series would sputter and die. Media reports zeroed in on how viewers had been duped, suggesting an inevitable backlash. But the fans – raised on the unreality of reality TV and with the role-playing ethos of the Web – seemed to take the revelation in stride. One guy who had corresponded regularly with Bree wrote to ask if he’d been conversing with Jessica Rose.

“No, you’ve been talking to Bree,” came the reply (from Amanda). “If you want to talk to Jessica Rose, you can go to her MySpace page. If you want to keep talking to Bree, use this email.”

“Fair enough,” the fan wrote back, and then went on to tell Bree the latest news in his life. To many, it didn’t seem to matter whether she was real or not.

Viewers and revenue

The show has a reliable viewership of 300,000 per video, and the team posts two, sometimes more, each week. Lonelygirl15.com, the site Beckett and Flinders maintain as the center of Bree’s universe, generates about $10,000 a month in ad revenue by attaching commercials to the end of the videos they stream. [...]

But what of the future?

[TV execs fail to understand the format] Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?” Beckett says. “You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15.” [...]

If this was going to be the first successful Internet TV show, they felt it needed to embrace the medium. As a result, they still don’t have a deal.

CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” has added 200,000 (+5%) new viewers while “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” is up 100,000 viewers (+7%) since the YouTube postings started.

Letterman’s interview with Borat has been viewed more than 1.4mn times over three weeks. It’s not difficult to imagine some of those people thinking, “Oh. Letterman is sometimes funny. I should check it out.” On the other hand, it’s very hard to imagine anyone thinking, “Well, I don’t need to watch that show now because two-and-a-half minutes of it have been posted here.”

David Poltrack, CBS’s chief research officer told Ad Age last week:

“We’re in a position right now where no one wants to take [content off YouTube] … When you have something the public really wants, the economic value in that is to come up with a way to satisfy the rights holders and serve the consumers.”

Albert Cheng of the ABC-Disney TV group added that the success of YouTube is about a different sort of viewing experience to that offered on mainstream TV:

The video-sharing site may have capitalized on the needs of the short-attention-span young adult on a widespread basis, but it’s not the be-all, end-all of accessing TV-related content.

“You wouldn’t want to watch ‘Lost’ broken into 50 pieces,” Mr. Cheng said. “There’s just more different use cases that are allowing users to control how they watch content.”

Cashmore speculates that the recent lawsuits lined up against YouTube by Universal Music, Comedy Central, Time Warner and others aren’t so much about intellectual property, but rather provide a bargaining chip to secure better distribution deals with the network. This sounds like a reasonable interpretation to me, though perhaps we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of fear and stupidity in some of these companies.

Many have attributed the success of YouTube to pirated videos from TV. And frankly, for me, it has been a great way for me to watch some of the best of American TV. As a Brit, I’d never even heard of the Daily Show or the Colbert Report until the appearance of YouTube. That’s obviously been a great thing for Comedy Central and MTV, its parent company.

However, user-generated videos have actually been its mainstay. Only the owners know the real statistics about this, but a visit to the ‘most viewed‘ section of the site will quickly clear up the misconception that illegal TV is the major pull. As I post, only one of the top twenty videos originated from television. The real pull, as the report suggests, was the ability for users to upload videos easily, be able to follow other users’ contributions, and to find videos that provided a major attraction:

YouTube’s draw is not just its controversial hosting of copyrighted content, but its user-uploaded videos that are organized by tags. Tagging and social networking features made it easy for users to find content, and a strong community has developed.

It wasn’t just press and buzz that strengthened YouTube. As with flickr, YouTube provides a human-generated search of multimedia, an area in which machine-generated search is currently weak. The tags, descriptions and comments which place the videos within a semantically-intelligible environment provides means whereby it’s possible to find err.. chavs on a roundabout by putting those words into the search engine. (damn. I am sure there are slightly more respectable examples). 18.1% of YouTube’s traffic comes from search engines.

Key statistics on video:

The market share of visits to YouTube increased by 249% in the six months from March to September 2006, and in September 2006 it was the 26th most visited website by US Internet users.
The market share of visits to MySpace Video has increased similarly, at 253% from March to September 2006. Recent changes by MySpace as of this writing will most likely serve to increase usage for MySpace Video as it seeks to bring YouTube users to its website.
The market share of visits to Google Video increased by 170% between March and September 2006, while visits to Yahoo! Video were up 13% and visits to Metacafe increased by 133%.
The average session time for YouTube, at 18 minutes 33 seconds in September 2006, was the longest among the above online video sites. Average session times for the other video sites were as follows: Metacafe, 11 minutes 58 seconds; Yahoo! Video, 11 minutes 37 seconds; Google Video, 9 minutes 9 seconds; and MySpace Videos, 6 minutes 35 seconds.

And the graph:

So YouTube is on top of the heap by a mile? Maybe not. A recent (November 7) report on Mashable suggests that MySpace has had the muscle to change things. Since the Hitwise report was published, Pete Cashmore reports, things have turned fairly quickly:

Our new data for the month of October shows MySpace leaping ahead of YouTube into the number one spot with dramatic growth. The number of video-embeds on MySpace grew on average 57% between the months of September and October, yet MySpace Videos grew a whopping 93.27%.

The importance of MySpace in serving the rest of the Web 2.0/Social Network environment is duly noted. What remains to be seen is whether cutting access for third parties which can inject content into MySpace pages will strengthen or weaken the Beast.

The report concludes its video section by noting that network effects (more users = still more users – because everyone’s there) has protected YouTube from competition in the same way that MySpace’s dominance of the social networking space has led to growth rather than decline. Whether the network power of a dedicated social network (MySpace) or a video-cum-social-network service (YouTube) will be dominant in the video space remains to be seen. Given the interconnectedness of all of these companies, proving success and providing evidence may be a tricky business.

The tide may also be turning when it comes to the economics of video 2.0, though. Recent debates have noted that none of the contributors to YouTube got any of the $1.65bn it received in stock from Google. There’s a certain amount of anger (read the comments) about that, which most of us can understand. YouTube is/was valuable because of its audience and its content. Does creating the mechanism for users to upload and find content created by their peers mean that the fruits of selling that mechanism should only go to its creators? I would suggest that the unpaid ‘crowdsourcing’ model for adding value to a network may already be reaching the end of its days.

“I do note that Google’s stock is up. Yahoo and Microsoft’s are down.”

The market believes this can work. Long-time readers will know that I am a believer in the Wisdom of Crowds. As the book says, when they’re properly orchestrated, the masses can make better decisions than experts. Stock Markets are not ideal examples of this, I think, since reputations and rumour holds sway; success breeds success and vice-versa, but they come close in some respects.

What made YouTube so madly successful? Clips from copyrighted TV? People doing crazy stunts? Talented pets? All of those things. What made YouTube work was that it was “the place”. It was the corner of the park after 7pm; it was the back of the bike sheds; it was where to go. It was where to waste some time; it was where to find stuff to stick on your page and mail to your friends.

The technology doesn’t matter; it never did. YouTube’s technology was ripped off a thousand times in the first year. Like others have said, though, you can’t clone a community. There may be a thousand digg clones, but there’s only one digg. YouTube has the community; none of the others do.

That said, I think that Mark Cuban had a good point when he said that anyone who bought YouTube would be morons in for a hard time from ambulance copyright-chasing lawyers. Like he said, a large,wealthy owner will invite litigation in a way an independent, poor owner won’t. But I don’t care.

What I care about is what does this mean for/about Web 2.0?

Sensible media owners will court GooTube rather than sue it. This will be the model for all the mainstream’s interraction with social media. I see advertisements and press releases daily from firms hoping to get their clients to embrace social media. There is an enormous market for this sort of thing. Google knows that, that’s why they bought the company. If they couldn’t think of a way to create AdSense for Video, that works through deep search on the content, then they wouldn’t have bothered. Look forward, hipster viral marketeers to having your adverts paid-per-view when they go on YouTube. YouTube didn’t have the capacity or know-how to scan video for stuff that should be paid for. If Google doesn’t, I’d be very surprised.

And does your company really want to sue the best channel to advertise any future moving picture project? I show 5 minutes of your show in a shakey, Flash-projected, low-resolution player. If your show is any good, have I helped you or hindered you?

Web 2.0 is now legit. YouTube, perhaps more than any other 2.0 startup, was the one that made people say “yeah, yeah – very fancy, but you haven’t got a business model”. Paul Graham’s idea, that if you make something that people really want, then the money will come has almost been proven. Being bought isn’t the same as having a successful business, sure, but YouTube’s social capital plus Google’s intellectual capital sounds a pretty convincing bet to me. (more reasons why this can work here).

MySpace has already done it (IMHO NI should have bought YouTube first: it’s an equally strong synergy) – they’re scheduled to become profitable right now, and have double the profits in twelve months. The ‘advertisers don’t want to be there’ argument is wearing thin already. How much more so when brands wake up to the fact that it’s the only way they’re going to reach 13-24s?

Web 2.0 is now mainstream. Yahoo grabbed del.icio.us and flickr. Google already has Writely and has launched Maps, Spreadsheet and other 2.0 products; their search is arguably 2.0 on its own. MS Live is deeply influenced by 2.0. But wasn’t/isn’t YouTube the most anarchic, freedom-loving, commie-pinko-loving 2.0 service of them all? Google can’t screw it up. That would be $1.65bn down the pan. They need to think of a way to embrace it. Damn me if their lawyers already haven’t [insert future legal ruling allowing YouTube stuff here].

Google wouldn’t have bought YouTube if they thought it would adversely affect their stock. Big companies don’t work like that. It didn’t. What Google, YouTube and the rest of us know is that this is the way forward.