Regarding Dave's comment on the bubbling up of YouTube videos - the
phenomenon reminds me of the lessons in a behavioral finance class I'm
currently taking at Berkeley. The psychology goes as follows, That
person is buying, so they must know something that I don't.
Therefore, I will buy as well. In the stock market, there is
typically a correction that punishes investors that simply follow the
noise. I wonder if there could be a similar correction online where
viewers stop going to YouTube as they are tired of being burned by
bad videos with lots of views.
Cheers,
Brett Wilson
UC Berkeley Haas School of Business
MBA Candidate 2007
--- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, Mike Meiser
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Ha! Great Rant!
That was well said David. I can tell by the way it reads that was
written
stream of conscious by someone with something to say. I love it. I
think I'm
going to reblog you if you don't mind.
My favorite points are as follows.
... it's doubtful that even YT with its huge numbers can deliver a real
audience. ...even having a hugely popular video - in the multiple
millions
of views -- cannot deliver even a fraction of that audience to
your next
effort.
I too have noticed this exact same effect wherever I blog. There
seems to be
a HUGE roving mass of people that has no interest in following up or
keeping
up on users or feeds. It suggests some sort of long tail or 80/20
rule...
that while there are core groups of friends and media makers that the
majority of traffic is just media consumers skipping from one knee jerk
video to the next. It'd be very interesting to see what kind of bell
curve
would be created if you plotted the views on every video on youtube. I'm
guessing the head would be HUGE... but the tail even bigger.
The YT statistics appear to be cooked in at least a couple of ways. In
navigating around YT one often manages to watch videos twice by
accident
by going back in the navigation. Kids put their videos online and
refresh
refresh refresh to get to the top of the most watched lists. It's so bad
that there are videos outing egregious perpetrators and
demonstrating the
effectiveness of the technique. It seems that there are many
aspects of the
YT wayfinding experience designed to generate lots of accidental
views and
crank up the numbers.
This is new news to me and extremely interesting. I'm dying to know how
widespread this is.
All of this suggests chaos, randomness, luck, timing and a
total lack
of a cohesive consumer behavior.
Yes, but these are the very elements of success... nothing attracts
a crowd
like a crowd.
What's more they make it quite possibly very easy to stick
advertisements
under their noses. I think it's beautiful that youtube will profit
off of
your videos and your friends by sticking corporate messages under
people's
noses and I suspect that some sort of mass exedus or at the very least a
backlash will quickly begin when people realize the profits youtube is
making off them with no balance, no representation, and no guarentee in
sharing those profits... a form of taxation without representation
you might
say. It is definitely a case of nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.
...and best of all...
YT is a website where any cute girl under 25 who appears to be not
full of
herself is valued, dogs on skateboards are endlessly fascinating,
lighting
your farts on fire is high art, and most things displaying
sentential logic
or thought requiring more than 20 seconds of attention are doomed.
YouTube
is a big bloated chimera.
Snap! brilliant summation, even if that last sentence is a little
harsh. You
can really tell a culture by what it values, and I think you sumed it up
quite well.
By comparison the open vlogging space I notice is a completely different
space. It'll be interesting to see how the two evolve.
Peace,
-Mike
mefeedia.com
mmeiser.com/blog
On 2/6/07, David [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Mike M. is correct that YT has only landed a first punch. And it may
be a big showy punch with no power behind it. The YT statistics
appear to be cooked in at least a couple of ways. In navigating
around YT one often manages to watch videos twice by accident by
going back in the navigation. Kids put their videos online and
refresh refresh refresh to get to the top of the most watched lists.
It's so bad that there are videos outing egregious perpetrators and
demonstrating the effectiveness of the technique. It seems that
there are many aspects of the YT wayfinding experience designed to
generate lots of accidental views and crank up the numbers. In
addition, the network effects on YT are enormous. If your video
bubbles up to a spot where people will see it -- like most viewed of
the day or week list -- it will go on garnering many many more hits
while often better videos languish. As a result, it's doubtful that
even YT with its huge numbers
