YouTube Video Stats, Sharing, and 2007 Re-Mixed

destinyland writes "YouTube's most popular videos in 2007 were a bunch of major label music videos, and YouTube is scrambling to re-assure the net roots community with an alternate list of 2007's "Most Memorable" videos. 'The rankings, released by YouTube on Thursday, took into account the most shared, most discussed, top rated and general popularity of clips...' One article argues that the real trend in 2007 was viral re-mixes of the original viral videos. 'In 2007 the viral video stars spawned their own wave of counter-memes, proving once again that the internet moves in mysterious ways.'"

Parent is MyMiniCity spam.

[sethstorm]

This video is tipped to be most popular in 2008, with over 6 million hits in three days [dwarfurl.com][youtube.com]

Stuff like that needs a nice swift addition to the lameness filter.

Re:

[gfody]

looks like one of the minicity spammers got some mod points

Parent is spammed troll link, notice is relevant.

[cwcpetech]

This video is tipped to be most popular in 2008, with over 6 million hits in three days [dwarfurl.com][youtube.com]

It is known spam, no need to mod the warnings down.

(coincidentally the captcha is alerted)

YouTube needs an "off-topic/deceptive" flag

[Animats]

YouTube needs some kind of flagging system:

1. Clip is not even vaguely related to title or description.
2. Clip is a collection of stills.
3. Clip contains pirated video with crap music replacing the original.
4. Clip contains pirated audio with crap video replacing the original.
5. Clip contains ads.
6. Clip contains logo overlays.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

You could just set up an external list of videos that don't suck, in something as mundane as your /. journal page.
Why wait for YouTube?

Re:

[Tangent128]

7. Clip is a lower-quality, higher-bandwidth rip of a Homestar Runner cartoon.

Re:

[Khaed]

8. Clip says "OFFICIAL TRAILER" in the title but is a fanmade POS that doesn't even contain scenes from the movie in question.

Re:

[troll -1]

Perhaps the last thing youtube needs right now is this kind of feature-creep. If enough people share our dislikes the clip won't be shared and it won't be popular.

What's nice about youtube is any clip can become popular. It's a very democratic system. Contrast this with the big media distribution system we've suffered all these years (aka television) where other people decided what was good for us.

Re:

[jo42]

You forgot:

0. Clip is dumb arse retard cr*p suitable only for "Duh. Heh. Heh. Duh." mentalities.

Re:

[illectro]

How about 'clip is static image so I can upload a piece of music to a video site' - it annoys the hell out of me to find a reference to some piece of music and to think 'oh I never knew that had a video' only to watch it and realise that the uploader just wanted to share his/her mp3. These people need to find a site which lets them upload the music directly [imeem.com] without trying to turn it into a video file.

Re:

[niteice]

7. Clip is, at least in part, Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.

These Videos Cost Youtube Money

[illectro]

All those major label videos are costing Youtube money to show, that's why embedding is disabled for many of those most viewed videos - because they have to pay a cut of the Ad revenue, and with embedded videos they're not getting any direct ad revenue. This is exactly why youtube wants to promote its 'alternate' list, because otherwise the bloggers won't be able to embed any of the top videos on their pages and drive traffic to youtube.

Interesting but limited.

[jd]

The problem with highly generalized lists is that they don't really reflect the fact that society is not a cohesive whole but a collection of groups of which one is overwhelmingly dominant. The only group reflected, then, is that dominant one. The other groups are too small to ever be seen in overall statistics.

The problem with any network stats-derived list is that you can't count unique individuals. Multiple users may share an IP address. A given user may have multiple IP addresses. What's worse is that if you count page hits, rather than visitors, you end up counting the same people multiple times. Or are they people? Maybe some/all are scripts. It's not like there's a shortage of scripts for pulling YouTube content, and I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA lawyers have bots which search for keywords that may be of interest. They usually do.

Besides which, I'd far prefer one decent copy of Bill Baggs' videos to be up there, and maybe some of the rarer broadcast sci-fi, such as The Changes or Doomwatch, where efforts to make them available legally are either derisory or non-existent. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of copies of the same music video in many cases. People should be able to enjoy music, sure, but what possible benefit is there to having so many identical versions? Greater diversity of content would benefit more people and increase the value of the service as a whole.

(I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA would prefer no copies at all, but that's not going to happen and it wouldn't be good for it to happen. That being said, YouTube needs to be more than about those two - their egos or their products.)

Re:

[mrbluze]

There is hardly a point in making lists if they are not based on something tangible, like a hitrate. Otherwise you'd get the "Youtube Arbitrary-100 of Videos of 2007".

People are voting by where they browse and, unless you're suggesting there is doctoring of numbers going on (wouldn't be surprised if it were the case), I doubt there is external interference going on eg: by multiple viewing by a single user having any significance.

Also, it's all just marketing. People who haven't visited Youtube in a while wi

Plurality vs Majority

[timeOday]

I'm wondering whether youtube serves up more mainstream commercial videos (as people might assume from reading the article), or more of the "viral" content for which youtube became famous. In itself, the fact that the most popular videos were commercial does not answer this question. Imagine there are 1000 videos on youtube - 100 "mainstream" and 900 "viral." Now imagine 1100 people visit youtube. 900 choose randomly from the viral videos (for an average of 1 viewing each) while the other 200 choose a m

Links to videos

[jgannon]

Since TFA didn't provide any links, here are all of the videos mentioned. A lot of these are old favorites, but there are a couple I hadn't seen.

Obama Girl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU [youtube.com]
Leave Britney Alone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc [youtube.com]
Battle at Kruger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM [youtube.com]
Esmee Denters sings Justin Timberlake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Grnh7Qin8 [youtube.com]
Chocolate Rain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA [youtube.com]
Nora the Cat plays piano: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ860P4iTaM [youtube.com]
Otters holding hands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno [youtube.com]

Re:Links to videos

[Bellum Aeternus]

What the article doesn't seem to cover is people like Marie Digby [mashable.com], who was being portrayed as just a girl singing some song who did good and got a record deal (like Esmee Denters) when in fact it was a media campaign by her record company Hollywood Records (a Disney company) to get her known and selling albums.

The fact is: the big record companies are finding ways to utilize YouTube just like they've utilized radio and MTV.

Re:

[hansamurai]

I guess that's a good thing, right? Lots of people here point at the music industry and laugh saying they can't adapt and how they're in the stone age. And here they are using Youtube to their advantage. I'm not saying their tactics weren't sneaky but at least they were interesting looking back and she's obviously famous now (not that I've heard of her).

major labels never learn

[fermion]

First, i understand that correlation does not imply cause and effect.

But I wonder why the labels are not embracing youtube more. It seems like the same mistake with MTV in the mid 80's. This was a good time for the music industry. CDs had people paying again for music they already owned, and MTV was pushing the music without huge expense to the labels. Sure the labels had to produce the videos, but that was, of course, mostly at the artists expense. This reversed a downhill slide in music sales. Extrapolating from the late 70's sales, it is likely that current sales would be about half of what they are, and only about half the people would be buying.

What is also correlated is that as soon as MTV became less music and more television, the sales growth tapered off. Now did MTV change formats because the saw the labels could no longer push a compelling product, or did the lack of major label cooperation lead to MTV to change formats and end the cheap advertising for the labels? Who knows.

What is clear is that this decline decreased coincidently with introduction of iTunes and the iPod, and we if believe that MTV made a difference, we can see how things like YouTube might be cheap advertising as well. I have read stuff suggesting that a larger percentage of the population buy music now than ever before. I don't know if that is true. Sure they may spend less per person, but perhaps what the labels should do is concentrate more on populous advertising, rather than trying to extract ever more money out of each customers, which will only lead to the problems of the late 70's where they have few customers that are willing be so extremely monetized.

Re:

[illectro]

You've never looked at imeem.com then? It's youtube for music - upload music from your favourite bands and anyone can listen to them - a fraction of the ad revenue gets paid to the label and all of the major labels have signed on. So, I think they do get it, you just haven't been paying attention ;-)

Monkeyballs

[capnkr]

It was a late 2006 video - so it didn't make the list, but is still one of the funniest of all... :)

(No link to Youtube version, since they lamely require registration first...)

Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8572086082639363544&q=monkeyballs&total=584&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0 [google.com]

I'm Confused

[Frosty Piss]

YouTube's most popular videos in 2007 were a bunch of major label music videos...

So this means that contrary to what we hear here at Slashdot, most people DO like the "product" the the Major Labels "produce"? I'm confused.

Re:

[weirdcrashingnoises]

You're confused, people here at slashdot don't say that.

people here at slashdot DO say that people here at slashdot don't like the 'product' the the Major Labels 'produce'. Most people are not readers of slashdot. most people are also idiots. most people on slashdot are not.

Re:

[4D6963]

most people are also idiots. most people on slashdot are not.

I'd love to see a poll being conducted on this site asking how many people on this site think so. Funnily enough I for one think that most people are not idiots, except the most people on Slashdot.

Is it just me...?

[xthor]

Am I the only person here who's never seen ANY of these videos? Hell, I'd never heard of Chocolate Rain till I read this story.

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[kdart]

It's not just you. There is at least one other.

Re:

[value_added]

Am I the only person here who's never seen ANY of these videos? Hell, I'd never heard of Chocolate Rain till I read this story.

If it helps, I'm still working on the "net roots community" reference. I used to be big reggae fan, but that was years ago.

well...

[snuf23]

You're probably so out of touch you missed this great viral video [youtube.com] of 2007.

Youtube is the new MTV & VH1

[cashman73]

What's really ironic is how MTV & VH1 have changed ... starting in the 1980s, with mostly music videos, and then almost entirely eliminating the videos in favor of pop culture garbage sometime in the 1990s that doesn't seem to make sense to anyone with greater than an 11th grade education. Now, Youtube comes along, and still has all the pop culture garbage, but it's on demand, so those that enjoy that cr*p can watch it if they choose to, but the rest of us can enjoy our music videos again,... And the nu