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

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.