1. That Was Funny The First 100 Times: “people are too savvy with the internet at this point to still be enchanted by [YouTube's] simple, chintzy magicks…”
2. Cynicism: “the marketing companies overplayed their hands on this one, taking what could have been occasionally fun extra components to more mainstream ad campaigns and just overdoing it to death…”
3. TV on the Computer: “Virals were a distraction from other stuff on the computer, and now virals have just become that stuff on the computer. So what distracts us from that? Television! On, um, the computer…”

Take a vacation. You sound like a hipster complaining about indie rock.

Yup, the interweb’s favorite water-rat-slash-military-experiment is actually a viral marketing campaign for the forthcoming movie Splinterheads

Blair Witch set the bar pretty high for Hollywood’s viral marketing ambitions, but Splinterheads’ marketeers have done pretty well with this one: coverage on CNN and FOX NEWS, blogger lurv, 240 videos on YouTube, almost 20 (?!) posts on Gawker…

Except… what’s the connection between this “carnie” movie and a monster on the beach?

Don’t get me wrong: I’d never heard of this movie before, and now I have. I simply question the efficacy of a “viral” marketing campaign + a brand vs. a branded viral marketing campaign

This is the same question I had when I saw bluetooth headset maker Cardo‘s “Cellular Popcorn” videos — at the time their logo was nowhere in sight, and over 10 million views later date I’m not sure anyone really knows that it was them.

Without knowing your audience it’s difficult to make improvements towards your end goal, whether that’s becoming internet famo, selling more widgets, or just getting more page views. Here are a few free analytic tools to help you narrow down the tasks at hand by delivering detailed information about a website’s audience:

Compete

• Type in one or more URL and get estimates of their traffic, growth, and “velocity” (ooh): apple.com vs. microsoft.com
• Also shows what search terms are driving traffic to the sites
• Allows you to compare traffic between up to 5 other sites
• Measures the top 1 million US websites.
• Features an excellent blog: blog.compete.com

Google Trends

• Type in a search term, (everyone’s favorite example: “iphone”) and see how many people have been searching for it: link
• Type in a couple of words for comparison, like “iphone, blackberry”
• Cross-references with major news posts related to the search terms, helping explain spikes & dips
• Google trends now features web traffic estimations, too, but it’s not as reliable as other services. Try “apple.com, microsoft.com”
• Breakdown of traffic by country, city, and language

Quantcast

• Traffic rankings for any website… and detailed audience demographics: apple.com
• Measures frequency of visit, and classifies into cool “addicts,” “regulars,” “passers-by” user groups
• Analyzes what other sites the audience visits, and even what magazines they read (hello, media buys)
• Targeted towards advertisers, e.g. lists what kind of ads a site accepts (if any)
• Can add tracking code to your site to share/improve data about it (and deepen their own data reach)

Alexa

• Alexa was first to market with web traffic estimates, but its algorithms are now widely considered inferior to Compete & Quantcast
• Recently expanded to include more data about international audiences

Bonus:

Brandtags

• Not surprisingly, started by a marketing dude
• Addictive, stream-of-consciousness brand association game that shows visitors a logo and asks them to type the first thing that pops into their head.
• Aggregate associations reveal brand perception when viewed backwards
• Updated with new brands often, and offers an opportunity to suggest your brand

Tips from YouTube comedian Nalts, currently #92 most subscribed of all-time, #22 comedian on YouTube, and self-proclaimed “Viral Video Genius”.

Some of our favorite videos: Farting in Public, Hamster on a Leash, and almost 700 (!) other videos typically involving his kids, pets, wife, or pranks. And now Product Placement:

In light of being passed over by YouTube’s ad-share partnership, Kevin Nalts is now offerings his services. $2K-$5K gets you a custom viral video that mixes entertainment with product placement.

… well hello there branded content.

This could be big: independent producers getting paid relatively small amounts of money to make funny vids with a logo at the end. Don’t bet on 10-million-view “viral” status, but a decent 15k-50k (and possibly more) for a few thousand dollars is a drop in the hat.

Branded content isn’t threatening “legit” ad agencies any time soon, but it does fill in the business model gap for YouTube stars who just want to keep doing what they’re doing (and doing well). Kudos.

comScore just put out their March 2008 online video report: “Number of Online Videos Viewed in the U.S. Jumps 13 Percent in March to 11.5 Billion”

YouTube clocks in at only 50.9% of unique visitors and 38% of total videos watched, which is a radically different figure than the Hitwise’s “73% market share” number. Seems Hitwise excluded all of old media’s web video offerings, like Fox and Viacom (NBC). Those outlets occupy the majority of the slots in comScore’s top 10. This doesn’t surprise me at all… I freakin’ love Hulu.

Other notable findings from March 2008 include (ed: emphasis by internetfamo.us)

* 73.7 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* 84.8 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
* 47.7 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (8.4 videos per viewer).
* The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.
* The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.

NYU PhD student Alice Marwick delivered an excellent keynote on Day 2 of ROFLCon last weekend, where LOLs and anecdotes were in abundance. Presenting some of her work on “social status and elitism in Web 2.0″ Marwick brought a badly needed breath of critical analysis to the conference.

Ideas that stuck out to us, expanded by her recently released lecture notes.

A taxonomy of celebrity

• careerist promoters: people who maintain an internet presence to further their offline careers or activities. e.g. Julia Allison
• creative promoters: “seeking recognition based on what they create, not just their own persona.” e.g. Ze Frank, Robert Scoble
• self promoters: “people who are promoters, but they’re promoting themselves as a product.” “scenequeens of Buzznet” cited; sure Tila Tequila falls in here too.
• reluctant celebrities: “someone with no desire to become famous can become notorious very quickly… some end up enjoying their newfound fame, others find it disturbing, distressing, and even deeply troubling.” e.g. Star Wars Kid

Clash b/w Internet humor and IRL humor

• “Internet humor isn’t universal humor. It’s localized.”
• e.g. the real world did not find the 8th-inning Mets rickroll very funny.
• Also, Jimmy Kimmel appearances of Internet celebs like Tay Zonday and StSanders aren’t received so well by the audience. Audience doesn’t get it, and Kimmel never tries to explain. Maybe because he doesn’t get it either?

Fame as a drug of validation

• “Educational programs that emphasize self-esteem have created a generation of narcissists.”
• Cited in Alice’s talk, Jake Halpern’s book Fame Junkies details fame lust at length, and in particular highlights the notion kids today perceive it to “easier than ever” to become “famous”… which is a big part of why we call it “famo” around here.

The logical followup to “Cherry Chocolate Rain”, aka I Move Away From The Mic To Sell Out.

p.s. don’t forget to cast your vote: Tay Zonday for Paris Hilton’s new BFF!

Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today indicating that while online video sites as a category have seen a 7% drop in traffic year over year since March 2007 – YouTube has seen a remarkable 32% growth in visits during that period. YouTube’s market share in the video sector is now at 73.18%, Hitwise reports.

That’s significantly higher than Google‘s all-time market share high-point among search engines. Google saw an all-time high 67% of searches performed in March, also according to Hitwise.

MySpace TV came in second place last month, with just over 9% of visits. Google Video was 3rd at 4%, meaning that the two Google properties combine to hold a staggering 77% marketshare. Hitwise numbers are limited to US internet users and in this case to 68 selected top video websites.

Last weekend Andrew Baron put his Twitter account (and its 1600 followers) for sale on eBay.

Account sales happens all the time in World of Warcraft. Selling customer lists is semi-standard practice among headhunters, and last year a Top 100 Digger attempted to sell his account. But Andrew’s Twitter account sale is stirring up a lot of discussion: about the value we place on an “authentic” account, about the value of its audience, and even questions about the value of a service where you can amass and broadcast to 20,000 “friends” just by clicking a lot. To wit: here at Famo we’ve demonstrated proof-of-concept Friend-O-Matic software that can help you on your way to this, and can assure you that many, many others have done similarly (more on this to come)

Business Week weighs in:

Was a Twitter account “property” he could sell? Did it belong to him since its value stems from the people who follow him? What are the ethical issues of selling access to people who have put their trust in you?
…
The flurry of interest around his account has actually made Baron more interested in continuing to use it. Since the bidding started, 300 new followers have signed up to follow Baron’s account. More important, the communication through Twitter has grown much more provocative and interesting than it had been before. “At first I got a lot of responses where people were shocked,” says Baron. “But I started to communicate with them and they were laughing about the idea. That’s what I want more than anything—[better] interaction on Twitter. Now I am overwhelmed with all of this back and forth.”

More coverage: TechMeme chatter, TechCrunch

YouTube series Break A Leg weighs in on trying to make a living in the world of straight-to-YouTube:

With over 2 million views on YouTube, we’ve received roughly $1,600 from their Partner Program. We also over half a million views at YouTube competitor Blip.tv, worth a whopping $100. Finally another competitor MetaCafe featured us on their front page and with nearly 100,000 views, we made $500 – which is great, except the only way you’ll ever get that many views is if you win a contest (like us) or your show is primarily about how round and pretty the female breast is. Plus a year later, MetaCafe still hasn’t paid us…

So until the Internet can produce any real amount of money for good creators, there’s no way it will ever be the future of TV as everyone in “new media” exclaims

Maybe they forgot to visit the Dept. of Internet Money?

MTV is 5 days into parisbff.com, where you, yes you, can fight to become BFF-4-LIFE w/ Paris Hilton by amassing votes… lots of votes.

Create a site profile and accumulate votes. The more popular you are the greater your chance of getting on the show!

Pretty smart — pre-selling viewers for an American Idol-style run-off. Also note that they only say “greater your chance”, avoiding a Mets-style rickroll-every-8th-inning situation.

Personally I’ve got my eye on a special someone, currently ranked #3 w/ 116,904 votes. GO TAY GO.

via elspethjane.com

The rough data’s in: about 57k uniques on the page =~ about 44k views on the embedded YouTube video. The video in question being a screencast of the purchase, of course.

More info:

This was an experiment we did last semester w/ Mr. G. Barlow as part of the Internet Famous course at Parsons (season II coming next semester). A couple of things we learned in the process:

1) You can buy your way into awards such as “Most Viewed Per Day/Week/Month” in a given category (in our case How To & Style)
2) Youtube view count vs unique visitors (tracked independently from youtube) match up pretty close when buying famo (44,716 Youtube views and 57,663 unique visitors) .
3) In our experience if you pay for 100,000 visitors it will translate into roughly 45,000 youtube views.
4) If you’re paying to drive traffic to a youtube clip on autoplay you’ll get banned if there is audio.

The stats page is publicly available here if you’re interested in doing further research in famo studies. Original project page here