Videomeme

Dove's 'Evolution' Viral Ad is Bigger than the Superbowl

There's a great article in Ad Age claiming that Dove's fantastic stop-motion animation, depicting the warped beautification process by which a model is transmuted from flesh to pinup, has driven more traffic to their CampaignForRealBeauty site than the very successful Superbowl ad they aired in February this year.

The viral ad, titled 'Evolution', was number 7 in this week's Viral Video Chart. Now we don't publish a chart of viral adverts, but we have the data, and it would look like this. That's right. There are no less than six different versions of the Evolution viral in this week's commercial top 10.

Alexa's data, for what it's worth, backs up the Ad Age story nicely.

Pay Per Post Spam?

We knew this would happen sooner or later. This video got into today's chart because bloggers appear to have been paid to link to it via PayPerPost. (The advertiser paying them also appears to be PayPerPost).

Is this a spam video? Should we remove it?

We identify videos that have been linked to only from spam blogs as spam and remove them straight away. But this isn't happening here. The blogs are relatively authentic. The posts that link to the video are pretty spammy - they're unsolicited marketing material masquerading as content. Right?

We experimented with PayPerPost a couple of weeks ago: we spent fifteen dollars on a handful of posts to see how the system worked. Our experience was mixed. Although we demanded full disclosure, a couple of bloggers didn't disclose the fact we'd paid them, at least not right away. That smelt bad. On the other hand, several bloggers posted honest feedback about our site and disclosed that they'd been paid to do it. That felt potentially really useful, if a bit weird. My guess is the weirdness will wear off. What I was after and what I got was a distributed focus group, with the conversation going on, at least partially, in public. (Actually, the most interesting conversations happened afterwards, in private, over email, but it's great that $15 got some real dialogue started). Most surprisingly of all, one PayPerPost blogger found out about us via PayPerPost and posted about us for free, outside of the PayPerPost system.

So our experience suggests that sometimes PayPerPost bloggers are posting about stuff they're genuinely interested in. Sometimes. Hell, maybe sometimes their readers are even interested in what they're writing.

We've left the PPP video up for the moment, if only to draw attention to the way in which PayPerPost is operating and the side effects it's having, not just on the blogosphere, but on the memetrackers like us who use the blogosphere as a kind of glorified clapometer.

Site Redesign Revisited

So, based on the feedback we've had, we've decided to shelve the redesign of Viral Video Chart for the moment and concentrate on a few navigational improvements. We want to make it easier to navigate through the archive of daily and weekly charts. The current archive of number ones provides a very poor way to do this. We've just created a video page so you can view videos without leaving our site and this page needs quite a lot of improvement. We'll be trying to make some cosmetic improvements to the site as we go, but are thinking we will do this incrementally rather than trying to change too many things at once.

Viral Video Site Redesign

It was never our intention to leave the Viral Video Chart quite as design-lite as it is currently. We just wanted to launch it really fast and never got beyond the logo-in-30-point-arial-italic vibe.

Please let us know what you think of the design below.

It still needs some work and we need to put some effort into the logo. We're a bit nervous, because a lot of people have said that they like the no-frills minimal design aesthetic of the current undesign. We need to balance that with the need for a recognisable identity. It's our intention to let lots of bloggers and sites syndicate the chart, so we're going to need a recognisable logo / brand / mark that can be stamped onto these syndicated charts and which can communicate that the data's from us and it's not just some editor's top-ten picks. (The design above shows a top ten, but the site will continue to display the top 20 videos).

The Chad & Steve Show

Is it just me or do they look like they dropped a ton of acid before shooting this?

Google YouTube Portmanteaux

So the brands are going to stay separate, but the hive mind can't stop whirring. Here's the blogosphere's favourite portmanteaux, ordered by number of blog posts according to Technorati.

1. GooTube 994 blog posts
2. GoogleTube 385 blog posts
3. GoogTube 253 blog posts
4. GTube 179 blog posts
5. YougleTube 1 blog post

Posts that contain Gootube per day for the last 7 days.

Go, GooTube, Go!

Google's mission is to monetize the world's information and make it universally revenue-generating by inserting sponsored text links around it.

So it happened.  Given Google's robust stance in the face of previous litigation threats from concerned copyright holders, the Googleplex looks like an ideal home. Mark Cuban still thinks Google is crazy, and he's right that it will be interesting to see how the copyright and commercial issues pan out. As Cuban points out, Google Video is currently trying to sell content that can be had for free on YouTube. 

Let's hope the issues with the TV networks and the record labels can be solved without resort to DRM. What's made YouTube so culturally exciting is the way in which the practical absence of copyright control has allowed creative works and cultural moments to spread and mutate at  unprecedented speeds.

So did Google's flaccid, undermarketed Google Video service just cost it's shareholders $1.65 billion? My earlier post called this wrong. As Barry Ritholtz points out, the uptick to Google's stock price over the last two days means that Google just got YouTube for free. That's pretty sweet. As long as they can plaster enough AdSense adverts on there, they'll be laughing...

These days a feature set isn't worth much

LeeAnn Prescott posts some really interesting Hitwise statistics relevant to the rumoured Google YouTube deal. She ends the post concluding that "Google, with its great engineering team, could eventually build all the features of YouTube and make it even better for far less money than it would take to buy it, if indeed the going price is over $1 billion".

Sure. If you don't know by now that it costs less than a billion dollars to create a site better than YouTube, you're  a lost soul. But with hundreds of video sites out there, many with more interesting features than either YouTube or Google - mostly built for less than a million dollars, let alone a billion - it's not really about the feature set any more, is it? This mislocates the issue, as though Google's engineering team has just been running slowly during the first 300m and might come through on the home straight. The race is  over. Google lost. Google failed to get its strategic priorities right and trashed several billion dollars of shareholder value in the process.

We've been tracking the popularity of YouTube and Google videos for the last few weeks from a different standpoint, that of blog linkage. Google's barely a player, despite recent feature upgrades and despite the fact that it owns one of the most popular blogging platforms on the planet. The only player that runs YouTube close is MySpace, and Google had their chance there and, perhaps understandably, passed.

GoogleTube

The internets are aflame with news that Google is in talks with YouTube about a $1.6 billion acquisition. Anthony Mayhurst and Jason Calacanis think it's a good idea. I tend to agree but only because it would correct Google's unutterably awful execution in the video space to date.

There must be plenty of analysts who've given Google a good kicking and Eric Schmidt a thorough roasting for passing on the MySpace acquisition. But a MySpace Google tie up would have been a very strange thing: there never seemed much affinity between the brands. Google & YouTube? As an aficionado of both brands, that makes sense to me.

You've got to stop and ponder, though, just how much Google's caution and lack of focus will have cost them if they cough up $1.6 billion for YouTube. (And how much much more it might cost them if they don't).

Google had a very decent Flash based video solution back in the summer of 2005, well before YouTube got any traction. I for one used to use the two sites quite interchangeably and both services were well ahead of anything else around at the time.

But Google made two big mistakes. First, it failed to innovate on features. Even if it had just kept pace with YouTube, feature for feature, it would have been in a much better position. Second, and much more unforgivably, it made no effort to leverage its almost inconceivably huge marketing advantage before it was too late. Google Video appeared as a link on Google's homepage, what, three months ago? And in the UK it still hasn't.

So you're telling me, Google, that the lightly used and unmonetized Google image search or voting for my favourite Google logo submitted by school children (all linked from Google's UK homepage) are more strategically important to you than video? Er, I don't think so.

Look, I love Google, but if I were a shareholder I'd be asking some pretty awkward questions right now. That is,  if Google's voting structure didn't make the opinion of external shareholders utterly irrelevant.

$1.6 billion. The cost of unchecked arrogance?