Videomeme

Top 10 Christmas Videos

OK, humbuggers, we're getting a bit carried away here, but it is the season of cheesy festive songs plus everyone is up to their neck in best of lists. Combining the two seemed irrestible. But this will be our last top ten of 2006. Promise.

Sooooo...we ranked Christmas videos by blog links and embedded videos, adding up the numbers from the last 3 months. What did we get? Lewd humour, kitsch, musical whimsy and the strong whiff of nostalgia.

Justin Timberlake's SNL skit has romped home to number one. Timberlake’s lewd musical skit, Dick in a Box, trumped both Larry the Cable Guy's set of redneck carols and the surreal Charlie Brown mashup, produced for the Scrubs cast Christmas party way back in 2003. The Timberlake thing looks set to become a bit of a phenomenon. On Sunday, it wouldn't have made the top 10. By midnight on Monday, it's overtaken everything, with several hundred bloggers posting it and five - count them, five - separate entries in today's overall top 20. (That's right. We still haven't implemented de-duping yet. We're working on it. Right now.)

Number four's Gangsta Santa is a bit of a basket case, leaving dead kids and ponies’ heads in his wake. Still, it's a slick piece, from the same people, incidentally, as The Easter Bunny Hates You.  No. 5 sees animated Indian popstar Boymongoose take on Bollywood hunks, corrupt sports stars, nosey inlaws and a totally insufficient dowry in a satirical version of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Charmingly infectious, in its way.

Number six is the well-loved Christmas Lights Gone Wild. It probably ought to be higher, but I rushed the link collation late last night, so have probably missed some important instances of it. The final four videos on the chart are all musical numbers. Billy Idol musters a restrained version of White Christmas, Mariah Carey and Wham! entertain with their seasonal standards, while supermodel Heidi Klum offers a surprisingly charmless uber-kitsch wonderland.

Full stats and embedded videos  follow...

1. SNL and Justin Timberlake - Dick in a Box | 327 Links | 972,634 Views

2. Larry the Cable Guy Sings Some Christmas Carols | 208 Links | 346,715 Views

3. Charlie Brown Christmas - Performed by the Cast of Scrubs | 192 Links | 223,100 Views

4. Santa Claus – Steady Mobbin’ | 82 Links | 208,154 Views

5. Boymongoose - Twelve Days of Christmas | 76 Links | 721,699 Views

6. Christmas Lights Gone Wild | 69 Links | 1,153,795 Views

7. Billy Idol – White Christmas | 60 Links | 70,598 Views

8. Mariah Carey – All I Want For Christmas | 51 Links | 424,891 Views

9. Wham! – Last Christmas | 42 Links | 499,802 Views

10. Heidi Klum - Wonderland | 38 Links | 137,831 Views

Enough, I tell you.

The Top 10 Viral Videos of 2006

This is the chart of charts: the most viral videos of 2006, across all categories and all major video sharing sites. Sure, everyone is producing top tens. Sure, you can cut the data any way you like. Or ask your friends. Or you can just list your favourites.

But these are the clips that have - objectively - been talked about the most online. We collected the top 5 instances of each piece of content and added up the number of links to and embeds of each unique video. You can get a more conventional view of all the charts here.

One of the interesting things you can see from the data below is the occasional breakdown of correlation between buzz and viewing behaviour. The Kerry clip has been linked to nearly 40,000 times - nearly twice as many as the next one down - yet viewed less than a million times. In contrast, the most viewed video of the year, Evolution of Dance, has been viewed a staggering 40m times, yet been linked to only a third as many times as the Kerry clip.

1. Kerry Belittles U.S. Troops | 38,710 links | 876,228 views

2. Free Hugs Campaign | 20,829 links | 7,862,099 views

3. White & Nerdy | 17,685 links | 11,085,593 views

4. Worst Burglar Ever | 16,919 links | 2,517,526 views

5. Evolution of Dance | 13,152 links | 39,606,662 views

6. Kiwi! | 13,052 links | 4,662,680 views

7. OK Go - Here It Goes Again | 12,869 links | 12,887,893 views

8. Colbert Roasts President Bush | 10,704 links | 3,020,723 views

9. A Message From Chad and Steve | 8,041 links | 2,142,896 views

10. Guinness World Record for Most T-Shirts Worn at One Time | 7,342 links | 2,508,908 views

Top 10 Homemade Videos of 2006

This is what the 2006 top 10 looks like if you strip out all the commercial stuff . (There are two TV clips and two music videos in the overall viral chart).

1. Free Hugs Campaign| 20,829 links | 7,862,099 views

2. Worst Burglar Ever | 16,919 links | 2,517,526 views

3. Evolution of Dance | 13,152 links | 39,606,662 views

4. Kiwi! | 13,052 links | 4,662,680 views

5. A Message From Chad and Steve | 8,041 links | 2,142,896 views

6. Guinness World Record for Most T-Shirts Worn at One Time | 7,342 links | 2,508,908 views

7. UCLA Student Tasered by Police in Library | 7,139 links | 1,658,539 views

8. Amateur - Lasse Gjertsen | 6,371 links | 1,777,299 views

9. Michael Richards (Kramer) Racist Outburst | 4,352 links | 4,148,149 views

10. Hahaha | 4,235 links | 6,544,871 views

Top 10 Viral Adverts of 2006

Viral. Not as in edgy. Not as in produced by a hip viral agency. Just the most talked about ads of the year, as measured by blog buzz.

1. Wii / Wii For All | Leo Burnett | 3,392 links | 1,784,131 views

2. Dove / Evolution| Ogilvy & Mather | 3,186 links | 3,506,058 views

3. Sky One / Real Life Simpsons Intro | Devilfish | 3,010 links | 12,837,365 views

4. Coke / GTA | Weiden & Kennedy | 2,434 links | 1,527,773 views

5. M-Tel / Voicemail | Unknown | 863 links | 5,595,674 views

6. American Express / Wes Anderson | Ogilvy & Mather | 565 links | 304,540 views

7. Super Soaker / Oozinator | Unknown | 404 links | 770,829 views

8. PS3 / Baby | TBWA / Chiat / Day | 384 links | 291,002 views

9. The First Post / Web 2.0 | Leo Bridle / Leo Powell | 341 links | 635,941 views

10. Volkswagen / Un-pimp Your Ride | Crispin Porter & Bogusky | 339 links | 2,527,099 views

Top 10 News Videos of 2006

Here are the most viral news clips of 2006, the year in review according to YouTube.

1. Kerry Belittles U.S. Troops | 38,710 links | 876,228 views

2. Colbert Roasts President Bush | 10,704 links | 3,020,723 views

3. A Message From Chad and Steve | 8,041 links | 2,142,896 views

4. UCLA Student Tasered by Police in Library | 7,139 links | 1,658,539 views

5. Claire McCaskill / Michael J. Fox | 5,968 links | 2,603,183 views

6. Michael Richards (Kramer) Racist Outburst | 4,352 links | 4,148,149 views

7. Bill Clinton Blames Others For 911 | 2,393 links | 2,606,547 views

8. Freedom | 2,203 links | 375,543 views

9. Iraqi Kid Runs For Water | 1,757 links | 514,830 views

10. The David Zucker Albright Ad | 1,533 links | 814,335 views

Top 10 Funny Videos of 2006

We've just finished compiling our charts of the most blogged about videos of 2006. For starters, here's the most buzzed about funny videos of the year. We'll upload the rest of the charts over the next few days.

1. White and Nerdy | 17,685 links | 11,085,593 views

2. Worst Burglar Ever | 16,919 links | 2,517,526 views

3. Evolution of Dance | 13,152 links | 39,606,662 views

4. Guiness World Record for most T-Shirts worn at one time | 7,342 links | 2,508,908 views

5. Amateur - Lasse Gjertsen | 6,371 links | 1,777,299 views

6. Little Superstar | 5,703 links | 7,164,074 views

7. Hahaha | 4,235 links | 6,544,871 views

8. Real Life Simpsons Intro | 3,010 links | 12,837,365 views

9. Where the Hell is Matt? | 2,934 links | 4,099,091 views

10. Chronicles of Narnia | 1,949 links | 5,149,119 views

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.

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...