YouTube Archive

This seems to have been a tough week for Google and their servers. Twice this past week Google News was down. Google noted that the issues apparently had to do with planes and backed-up Web traffic. Now I’ve been noticing for a while now that YouTube isn’t acting correctly. Many pages don’t load, videos are displaying an error message and the search function provides the error message displayed below.

As usual, please report in if you are experiencing issues with YouTube (or any other Google service). I hope they can get everything fixed so that we can watch more cat videos!

The last YouTube outage occured on April 23rd. At least Twitter is up and stable.

Content voting service Reddit has announced the launch of Reddit TV today. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee notes that Reddit TV is very similar to StumbleVideo from StumbleUpon which launched quite a long time ago.

There are a variety of categories including geek, happy, politics, sports and wtf. They are actively seeking sponsors to create “sponsored channels” and as a test they are using videos from the TED conference. Reddit has integrated Twitter as well so you can send messages to your followers which push them to the Reddit page (not the source content page).

Here’s a video from Reddit on how the service works…

Back in December, comScore reported that online video site Hulu reached 235 million streams which moved them into 6th place on the top 10 online video streams list. Today comScore released their latest videos viewed list for March 2009 and Hulu has moved up to the 3rd spot with 380 million videos.

This puts Hulu right behind Google/YouTube and Fox Interactive and moves Hulu above Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom. To put the 380 million mark in perspective, Google including YouTube videos were viewed over 5 billion times.

comScore is also reporting that for the month of March, Google/YouTube passed 100 million unique viewers. Hulu came in with 41 million viewers which puts the online video service in the 4th slot.

Other notes from comScore include: 77.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the average video length was just over 3 minutes.

Do you find yourself watching a lot of videos on Hulu? To be honest I’ve only used the service when I have missed a TV show that they offer (e.g. Lost, Chuck, etc.).

The topic of paid social media is something I’ve been thinking about a lot of the past few months. When I met with Scott Monty of Ford, I mentioned the idea of assuming that all social media is paid. Perhaps you already do assume that what you read is already paid or sponsored although I’ve tried to think that what I read is genuine unless otherwise noted. For the purposes of this discussion, I am leaving the “is paid social media good or evil” on the side for another day.

Scott noted that the 100 paid reviewers of the Ford Fiesta will disclose that they are part of the “movement”. That’s great that there will be disclosure - it’s something that many of the paid reviews systems have moved to. And while I am using Ford as an example, they are by no means alone with regards to my question. Whether it’s Izea, Magpie, in-house ad sales, etc, the question continues to grow in importance. And I haven’t even mentioned pimping by investors, friends, family members, etc.

Disclosure is easy on a blog, but what about as the blog entry is pushed around. Does the disclosure travel with the blog entry? And more importantly, what about all of the social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Plurk, etc.? How do we define disclosure on these networks?

Read the rest of this entry »

It appears the video sharing site YouTube is down and as of 2:38pm Eastern it has been down over 15 minutes. It appears embedded videos are working from my testing but the website is not.

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter.  In fact questions about YouTube’s outage are coming in so quickly that the instant you hit submit, there are already a batch more in the search queue!

I understand there are several people visiting local hospitals because they are unable to watch the latest cat videos. People, please remain calm during this unfortunate time. 

As always, please report in if YouTube is down for you as well.

Update: 2:50 pm - YouTube appears to be back to normal except for the HUGE Honda car ad at the top of the page. Check out this groovy video of a new type of pizza box that breaks apart into plates and can also fold back into a storage box for the leftover pizza!

This week Ford announced a new "social media" campaign named the Fiesta Movement around the upcoming launch of their new Ford Fiesta automobile. Ford will give 100 special "digital influencers" a European-spec version of the new Ford Fiesta for six months and seek their feedback. Unlike your normal test drive and feedback form type deal, here they have decided to get these so-called digital influencers to complete missions each month. While I don’t know what the missions are, you can be sure they will lead to lots of media mentions for Ford and the Fiesta.

A number of bloggers and journalists covering the launch and one post from Steven Hodson caught my eye. He called the program, "the ultimate social media experiment". As I do with all paid post campaigns, I questioned if any of the 100 would actually post negative comments about the car. This experiment as Steven calls it is slightly different than your normal paid review, but I believe it’s still in the same family. I also wonder how the income associated with this experiment will be reported (sorry old accounting hat on momentarily). Ford global communications team member Scott Monty commented that the people in this program are allowed to say whatever they want whenever they want. Scott went on to reply to another commenter noting, "if you think - for one second - that Ford is telling these people what to say or that we’re only looking for glowing reviews, I want some of what you’re smoking." Probably not the best way for a Ford executive to talk to a potential customer.

After reading Scott’s comments and learning that he was in NYC today, I asked to meet with him to learn more about the program and have him answer some of my questions. We met this morning at the Javits Center where the International Auto Show is set to begin in a couple of days. Side note, I posted a bunch of photos of some exotic cars on Flickr this afternoon. I enjoyed the conversation and while there’s no doubt that Scott and I disagree about whether this program is equivalent to any other paid post/review campaign, I hope I left him with some things to think about and consider.

The net is that Ford is buying media mentions - if all they wanted was feedback, they would give the people a form and have them submit it. This is more of a PR campaign than it will ever be a social media campaign. Just because you use Twitter or YouTube does not just instantly make it social media. It will be interesting to see how disclosure is handled as well with the 100 digital influencers. Scott says each person is required to disclose - but what about on the social sites? Will every tweet, image uploaded to Flickr or video on Youtube have a note about disclosure? Scott says the media will be tagged but will the average Internet user get that a tag = paid post? This issue of social media disclosure is actually much bigger than this campaign.

Ford will most likely get more honest feedback than a traditional paid campaign because the 100 aren’t doing paid posts for a living like some of the other paid review sites. On those sites, negative can quickly mean no future work - that’s probably not the case here.

A few of the questions with regards to this campaign that Ford will need to analyze are:

• Will Ford be able to move the needle in terms of top of mind awareness for not just the 100 in the program but you and me?
• When they program is over and the Fiesta is in production, will you consider it when you shop for your next vehicle?
• Will your overall impression of Ford change (either better or worse)?

I am glad Ford is running this program. Is it perfect? Certainly not. But it allows us all to discuss the pros and cons and get that much closer to better online marketing programs. As I told Scott, I wish the attorneys at my past employer would have let us move an inch here and there - never happened. I will be watching how this campaign moves forward and you can rest assured my thoughts (unpaid, no car, no gas) will appear here. And I look forward to continuing my industry conversation with Scott in the future.

Check out my video conversation with Scott - I tried not to duplicate the content in this post and in the video.

comScore is out with their latest U.S. online video report today. Back in May comScore listed Hulu for the first top in the top 10 with 88 million videos viewed. Today Hulu has moved up in comScore’s online video report for October to sixth position with 235 million videos viewed. Pretty amazing growth for a service some called crap before Hulu actually launched.

Other notable facts from the report:

• YouTube passed the 100 million U.S. visitor mark for the month of October
• ESPN listed in tenth position for views - I wonder how many of those views come from their auto-launcher on the espn.com home page (hate that feature)
• All of Google’s video sites pushed out more than 5.3 billion video views for October