YouTube Archive

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.

Continue reading “Ford Fiesta Movement Chat With Scott Monty (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

This morning we reported on the outage at Technorati. Om reports that Yahoo had some issues today as well. Now it appears that YouTube is out of service as well. We saw a few outages with YouTube earlier this year but the site has been rock solid since.

There’s a bunch of chatter about the outage over on Twitter. 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 10:45PM: YouTube does appear to load now however the site loads without the stylesheet.

Update 10:55PM: As c187 notes in the comments, Google’s server "http://s.ytimg.com" appears to be the issue now – and the reason for the style and look not loading.

Update 6AM: Apparently YouTube was down because they decided to bring out a awesome nasty looking new design update. Mike Arrington notes that they have also added a search bar to the embedded video option. My gut tells me they shrunk the header even further to allow for a larger ad space – but the text in the nav just looks like amateurish. I also noticed earlier this week they began trapping the referral url into the links inside the embedded movies. This will tell YouTube/Google where people are grabbing links from.

YouTube co-founder sat down with Spencer Kelly of the BBC to discuss several topics including copyright, revenue models and live streaming.

Hurley noted that when they started YouTube they weren’t familiar with the concept of "rights". They talk about the issues with Viacom and Hurley points to many brands actually wanting their videos on YouTube as they reach the company’s core customers.

On the topic of revenue models, Hurley said that the new click to buy will be one piece along with ads as the ads within the videos are more engaging than traditional display ads.

Kelly attempts to get Hurley to talk about costs for hosting, bandwidth, etc. but Hurley won’t share any figures.

Lastly the two talk about live streaming on YouTube. Hurley says that they are looking at new ways of engaging one another on YouTube and live streaming might be a piece of that but most importantly they will take their time on implementing these new engagement methods. 

Unfortunately BBC does not allow for embedding so you will need to watch the interview on their site.

I thought this commercial was pretty funny. Nothing worse than someone yapping on the phone while you are trying to do some business. Bigfoot makes an appearance in the video too. Happy Friday everyone!

Shipping company DHL wanted to get the word out about their online tracking services in Beijing. They created two campaigns and used YouTube to help spread the videos further than if they only placed them on their DHL China Web site. The idea behind both videos is to show that you can track your package at any time using their online tracking system. I will give you a moment to take it all in.

Here we see DHL delivery agents wearing sandwich boards that have a mouse arrow on them. I am guessing the unions here in the U.S. have a provision to not allow delivery agents to walk around with huge arrows on them as they deliver packages.

And then we have the DHL delivery vans also sporting a mouse arrow.

The delivery agent has no URL on their uniform or on the arrow – the van has a small URL on it. That’s where I’d focus DHL.