Nalts' 7 theories why YouTube decided to pay creators is worth a read, too, but my favourite quote is from NewTeeVee's, Liz Gannes. "You do need ads in order to share ad revenue" she notes snarkily, "so perhaps that’s why rewarding creators was a non-starter until now." Indeed.
OK, humbuggers, we're getting a bit carried away here, but it is the season of cheesyfestivesongs plus everyone is up to their neck in bestoflists. 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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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