Videomeme

Guardian Coverage

So we got some coverage in the Guardian today, thanks to an inexpertly penned and bluntly distributed press release we sent out last Wednesday.

There's several things about the 30-word piece that amuse me.

1. The coverage occurred a full 8 days after the post in BuzzMachine.
2. The online version has never shown up in Technorati, so we only got to know about it because someone applying for a job with us spotted it.
3. It drove less traffic than most of the 200-odd blogs that posted about us.

They also call the site a Top 20. This is interesting. Others have called it a Top 10. In fact, we currently publish a Top 25, but these deliberate misrepresentations perhaps suggest that we should choose a more resonant number.

10,000 users in 104 countries in 3 days. Cost? $300

OK, sure, I guess every site has users all over the place. It's the internets, goddammit. Still, our country breakdown gives me a strange feeling: I'm not sure whether I find the fact that the UK is just one local, domestic market amongst so many others troublesome, vertiginous or just plain exhilarating.

Alright, alright, we did spend more than $300. $356.26 to be precise. Here's the breakdown of our marketing expenditure last week.

• Electronic newswire service: $129.00
• Online advert on Kontraband: $100.00
• Online advert on Google: $87.26
• Online advert on Fark: $40.00
• Total: $356.26

And you know what, we spent way too much. If we did this again, we'd probably ditch the advertising.

10,420 visits on Friday

Over 10,000 visits yesterday. We can't quite believe it. We're guessing traffic will fall off a cliff over the weekend.

OMG! Traffic!

Wow! It's been quite an exciting 24 hours.

So yesterday:

• Jeff Jarvis, the Guardian columnist, wrote a really nice piece about us on his blog 
• Frank Barnako, from CBS MarketWatch, saw Jeff's piece and phoned me up just as I was leaving the office last night to do a quick phone interview, which you can grab here 
• 2,000 people had visited the site by the end of the day (up from 1,000 people on Wednesday)

Then this morning:

• Lots of blogs had picked up on the story and there was a flurry of posts in a befuddling number of languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch,  Russian, Japanese...
• We made the frontpage of del.icio.us - 212 bookmarks and counting 
• Google UK got in touch because they wanted to know  what we could tell them about the performance of their videos
  
• Over 3,000 people had visited the site by 11.00 AM!!!

Cool, eh?

Thanks to everyone who's linked to the site so far!

Sites Syndicating the Viral Video Chart

You can currently find our charts in the following places. (Click on the logo to view).

If you want to syndicate our chart for non-commercial uses, just review our guidelines then grab the XML.

For commercial uses,  call Scott on +44 (0)7974 328052 or email scott@unrulymedia.com.

5 reasons to advertise on our site

#1. We have a fanatically loyal audience of video junkies, creatives, bloggers, marketeers, agency wonks, PR professionals and ad execs who say lovely things about us. Subscribers to our daily and weekly emails include people working at Edelman, Sony BMG, LA Times, Ogilvy, Revver, Diffiniti, MTV, Nokia, i-level, DDB, Unilever, The Telegraph, Mindshare, vMix, BBDO, BSkyB, Mediacom, Fairfax Digital,  Ellen TV, Warner Bros, TV Guide, BBC, Al Jazeera...these are smart, high-income, influential folks.

#2. We can get your campaign in front of 250,000 such unique users. (We serve 1 million impressions to 0.25m uniques a month).

#3. We syndicate our charts to several prominent mainstream media outlets, including TVGuide, The Guardian and thelondonpaper.

#4. We get a disproportionate amount of press and blog coverage. See our Buzz / Press section for links and quotes. This doesn't mean that your campaign will get covered, too, but it does increase the likelihood.

#5.  We can develop innovative and bespoke advertising units for you. We're seasoned ad industry people with a high grade development team behind us.

OK. If you're sold, call Scott on +44 (0)7974 328052 or email scott@unrulymedia.com.  If you're  not,  take a deep  breath and start at #1 again. Repeat until convinced.

Advertising Rate Card for Viral Seeding and Sponsored Content

Above-the-fold custom content unit on the right hand site of all chart pages (100 x 75 image and around 30 words or so of copy):

• 2 weeks: $2,000.00
• 4 weeks: $3,500.00

IAB standard ad units:

• 728x90 IMU @ $15.00 CPM
• 300x250 IMU @ $20.00 CPM

All these prices are gross and we offer a 25% discount on rebookings.

We're happy to discuss more tailored solutions as well.  Like what? You might want to plaster the site with branded wallpaper for a day. Or create a custom top 10, either using your own content, or using us to find you relevant videos that will create a buzz among bloggers and journalists. 

Phone Scott on +44 (0)7974 328 052 or email scott@unrulymedia.com to talk about setting up a campaign.

EEK! We're live!

Now, technically speaking our new site should probably be in alpha. We'd send out a few invites, we'd get to correct all the dumb stuff we've done before anyone really notices, you know, fly low, look smart. But what the hell, that's not how we work. We wanted this site out there, that's why we built the damn thing in the first place, so we're gonna put it out there. We built it fast, we built it to throw away, we built it to test whether other people want this site as much as we do. If they do, then we'll work on it some more.

Anyway, we're pretty excited. As far as we know, this is the first time anyone's tried to create a proper, genuine chart for online videos. You know, one that looks at videos on all the big sites and actually ranks them against each other in a credible way. Maybe there's a chart out there that beat us to it, but we honestly spent three months looking - not as a research project, we just wanted to use the damn thing - and we couldn't find one. We looked at Technorati, we looked at Blogpulse, yes. We pored over YouTube's most viewed and Google's Top 100. We ended up building a Netvibes page with umpteen different video feeds on it. But nothing really hit the nail on the head. We're hoping this site does.

If you like our new site, there's three big things you could do to help us out.

   1. Email a link to as many of your friends, family and colleagues as you can
   2. Tell the world about us on your blog - a permanent link to us from your your sidebar would be just fantastic
   3. Vote for us on digg by following this link and hitting the 'digg it' button underneath the yellow score