Videomeme

MediaGuardian Partners with Viral Video Chart

The MediaGuardian is syndicating our weekly video chart and today they launched their own version of the chart on the Organ Grinder blog. There's a short news piece online about the launch of the chart and a little advert in the print paper today, which I'll scan in when I get chance.

There was also a story in today's Guardian about Michael Richards hiring a PR agent to try to save his career in the aftermath of his awful racist rant at an LA comedy club. It mentions that the amateur video footage first appeared on TMZ, but it'd be nice to see  a nod to YouTube's role in the dissemination, where versions of the video have been watched over a million times. We've detected 243 bloggers linking to the two most popular versions of this video on YouTube - the biggest of which reached number 1 in Wednesday's Viral Video Chart.

Republishing the Viral Video Chart

If you're interested in republishing our daily or weekly video chart on your site, go for it! (For commercial uses talk to scott@unrulymedia.com).

We recommend you grab content from us using our enhanced Atom feed, which has been designed for third party publishers and application developers.  These are the two main feeds:

• Daily Top 20
• Weekly Top 20

For non-commercial uses, all we ask in return is that you give us a prominent credit wherever you use our content. Please use the HTML snippet below, which will put a nice little 'Powered by' image on your site, like this:

Here's the HTML snippet:

<p><a href="http://www.viralvideochart.com"><img src="http://www.viralvideochart.com/resource/img/PoweredByViralVideoChart.gif" alt="Viral Video Chart - Tracking The World's Most Buzzed About Videos"/></a></p>

Now go forth and syndicate.

 

CBS Clips on YouTube Get Nearly 1m Views a Day

YouTube put out a press release on Tuesday waxing postive about the success of the CBS branded channel on the site.

CBS has uploaded more than 300 clips that have a total of 29.2 million views on YouTube, averaging 857,000 views per day, since the service launched on October 18.

Interestingly, they also attribute rises in TV viewing figures for some of the promoted shows to the success of the YouTube channel.

Ratings for the network’s late night programs, in particular, have shown notable increases. 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.

Now this may be wishful thinking, and they don't claim that YouTube is solely responsible for thes rises, but it's an interesting claim nonetheless in the ongoing power struggle between the content owners and the video sharing sites.

Real Time View

We've just added a new page to the Viral Video Chart.

The coolest thing it does is to open up the real-time video stream from which we compile the chart. As we scan the blogosphere, we're now publishing onto this page every new video we come across. In real time - or as close to real time as we can get.

This page also reveals the most blogged videos since midnight GMT, so you can see the videos most likely to make tommorrow's chart. (The daily chart is always compiled midnight to midnight).

If you want to get ahead of the curve, this is the place to do it.

Viral Video Archive

We've just added a daily archive to Viral Video Chart so you can browse previous days' charts going back to 7th September. We've added a Google COOP search box that seems to work OK. And removed the rolling seven day chart while we work on building out an official weekly chart, that we hope to launch to the world next Friday.

Politics 2.0

In an interesting post Antony Mayfield points out that half of today's top 10 videos are connected with US politics and ponders how YouTube might affect the upcoming election in an age when the concept of mass media has all but broken down.

How long before Dubya himself moves beyond The Google and gets his own channel on The YouTube? Or maybe instructs some interns to build his own YouTube clone as UK Tory challenger David Cameron has done at the wittily named WebCameron? BushTube 2.0 (beta) anyone?

EepyBird: Diet Coke & Mentos II, The Domino Effect

EepyBird famously made $35,000 by taking 200 litres of Diet Coke, 500 Mentos and videoing the results. A strong idea, post-roll ads from Revver, and millions of people forwarding the clip took care of the rest.

EepyBird certainly didn't discover that Mentos + Diet Coke = A Big Geyser. According to Wikipedia, Lee Marek developed the Mentos eruption as a demo for the Late Show with David Letterman in 1999, and viral videos of people reproducing the effect have been doing the rounds since at least February 2006. But the Bellagio's Fountain produced by EepyBird pushed the idea to its limit and caused the meme to cross over to a bigger, more mainstream audience.

EepyBird have now released a follow-up video, The Domino Effect (embedded at the bottom of the post), harnessing the power of the Mentos geyser to create a Coke bottle domino effect. Already number 2 in today's Viral Video Chart, and looking like it will make our first weekly Top 20, it seems certain to earn them a pretty penny.

Interestingly, EepyBird have ditched Revver in favour of Google. News of the ad revenue sharing deal with Google was announced in Google's Official Blog and covered snarkily by Techcrunch. This appears to be the first time that Google has brokered such a deal and looks likely to herald a big change to Google Video. Here's hoping that small video producers will eventually be able to share in the advertising revenue generated off the backs of their content - currently the programme is restricted to professional videographers with over 1000 hours of footage.