Say you just captured an amazing video of your cat doing something funny. It's time to upload it to YouTube right? Why stop there? HeySpread, a service from the folks at Particles was just updated Thursday morning to take the video you just captured and push it out to nearly 20 different video hosts at once.
Better yet, it keeps track of the views once they're there. You can view each video with daily-stats analytics, view breakdowns, and comparison charts to see how the same video is doing on different services. It'll also let you compare it with other videos (even if they're not yours).
In case you're already entrenched in YouTube, a built-in tool called YouClone will let you copy all your videos off YouTube and post them to other services without having to track down the original. All you need is your YouTube password and it will do the rest.
The service is not free, and uses a credit system that charges one to three 5 cent credits per video uploaded, transferred, watermarked, and tracked. If you're a videographer looking to get a video out there it's not a bad deal when you think about how much your time is worth.
If you're a cheapskate like me, there's also a free video stat-tracking service called TubeMogul that will do the tracking without the small fee. As for uploading to the rest of the services, though, you're on your own.
Hey!Spread - Video Distributing Web Service from Bruno Celeste on Vimeo.
On Friday morning, YouTube announced the second annual iteration of its YouTube Video Awards. What? Awards?
The video-sharing service, owned by Google since 2006, awarded accolades in categories like "Adorable," "Creative," and "Comedy" to original videos hosted on its site that were uploaded in 2007, as voted on by users. The prizes, per YouTube, are "bragging rights, a trophy, and a special invitation to an event later this year."
Okay, so the videos are kind of amusing. The "Adorable" category winner is a video of a baby who falls over every time he laughs (wonder what'll happen when his friends find out about that in 10 years), the "Creative" winner is that "Human Tetris" thing you've seen a million times, and the "Music" winner is none other than that "Chocolate Rain" video that everyone was watching last year.
But the culture of YouTube doesn't really lend itself that well to awards. YouTube, for better or worse, is a cultural hub rather than strictly a creative outpost; there's plenty of cool, original content there, and it's no surprise that Google would want to highlight the good stuff rather than the goofy prank videos and pirated content that propelled it to the upper echelon of the Web.
Content on YouTube, however, doesn't necessarily become popular because it's high-quality or original--just look at the Rickroll phenomenon, an '80s music video that has been seen millions of times because people get a kick out of tricking their friends into watching it. Or the current hot clip, a British public service announcement with a hilarious twist.
Or, for that matter, this week's number-one YouTube video: Barack Obama's most recent speech.
NEW YORK--Will it blend? This innovative ad campaign sure did.
A lot of Madison Avenue types have packed into midtown Manhattan's upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel for the annual OnMedia NYC conference, a sort of Silicon-Valley-meets-the-ad-industry event. The conference, which started Monday and ends Wednesday, is presented by new-media trade publication AlwaysOn. At the end of the day on Tuesday, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins announced 2007's "Best of Broadband (BOB) Awards," a hand-picked list of the top Web video ads that achieved viral success and actually worked.
Gimmicky? Of course. But after a day of panels and interviews, with plenty of talk of monetization and ROI and user engagement and the attention economy and just about every other ad-industry cliche you've ever heard of (as well as some you haven't), it was quite refreshing to watch a bunch of YouTube videos representing ad campaigns that actually worked. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.
Among the winners were winners of user-generated ad contests like Frito Lay's "Crash the Super Bowl" competition; faux-amateur clips like Ray-Ban's "Never Hide" ad; too-edgy-for-TV spots like one of Unilever's Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads; and naturally, "Will It Blend?" The YouTube video series from blender manufacturer BlendTec had been created without the help of an extrenal agency, and had already built up quite a fan base when it published the notorious "iPhone in a blender" video.
The full list is here. But what I'd like to know is, for every one of these runaway hits, how many equally creative Web video ad campaigns flop? I'm still a believer in randomness on the Web. But then again, I can't see any way that a guy putting an iPhone into a blender and hitting the "smoothie" button couldn't have been a huge hit.
It's a well-documented phenomenon: the rise of Web video has fueled a trend of 'bite-size entertainment.' Wired magazine devoted an entire cover story (actually, a set of mini cover stories) to it in its March '07 issue. The attention-deficient Web's appetite for small clips and short blog entries has gotten to the point where MySpace.com has actually condensed classic TV episodes into "minisodes" for its members.
But the latest viral video craze makes those three- to five-minute minisodes seem like Titanic. This is the "Dramatic Chipmunk," a 5-second clip of a chubby rodent making a foreboding face at the camera accompanied by a Snidely Whiplash-worthy musical interlude. (Bonus points if you know who Snidely Whiplash is.) The video proliferated, thanks to YouTube, as well as frat boy hub CollegeHumor, which put a link to the clip on its front page and touted it as "the best 5-second video on the Internet."
You can already tell that, after only a few days (the video was originally uploaded earlier this week), it's reached the gold-medal level of viral videos--somebody made a dance remix.
Here at CNET, we had a little bit of a debate about whether the "Dramatic Chipmunk" footage was actually real. Was it doctored in one way or another to make the chipmunk look more Hitchcock-esque? If it proved real, we wanted to know who the heck managed to capture the moment on video.
An e-mail to CollegeHumor Managing Editor Jeff Rubin answered our question: yup, it's real. The clip comes from a Japanese TV show in which the rodent was put on display for some reason. The priceless 5 seconds appear to have been the result of a very, very lucky camera angle.
CollegeHumor has uploaded the original footage and named it "Undramatic Chipmunk." You can see it here. And the full video also reveals, as zoology buffs had suspected, that the "Dramatic Chipmunk" isn't actually a chipmunk but rather a prairie dog.
UPDATE @ 1 PM PST: Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, CollegeHumor's in-house T-shirt retailer, BustedTees, is now selling a Dramatic Chipmunk t-shirt.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
YouTube's Super Bowl ads page is looking mighty fancy this year. They've created a new voting platform called Supervote. If anything, it's looking a little bit like Reddit with hot or not voting that moves each ad up or down based on user votes.
The page was set up as completely separate from the actual viewing gallery.
What interests me about this is whether or not this might become a permanent fixture on YouTube. There's already a star system for voting on YouTube videos, but having user-chosen list on the front page of YouTube as a replacement to the current listings for popular videos wouldn't surprise me.
YouTube and CBS have announced a partnership in the form of a contest for a chance to be featured during a Super Bowl commercial. YouTubers need simply create a 15-second video of anything they want and join the 15-second user group. The top five videos are picked by judges and put up on CBS.com, where people can vote on which one deserves the spot.
Dove is doing something similar for the Academy Awards, but the winners for that contest will get their own party out of it. There's no prize or revenue-sharing for this YouTube contest, so you're really only in it for the fame. What kind of message can be expressed in a quarter of a minute? Not a whole lot, but here's hoping for a Diet Coke and Mentos clip sandwiched by a beer commercial and a truck ad.
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