Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s JK Wedding Entrance Dance video on Youtube has met with extraordinary viral success. As I write this, the video has been viewed 17.3 million times. It is a joy to watch and I’m sure it was a joyous day as well. Jill and Kevin have added links to the video and to the video download page to support the Sheila Wellstone Institute, which is dedicated to ensuring that ending violence against women and children is a national priority.

I hope the 17+ million viewers have been able to make a serious donation to the institute.

On the commercial side of things the video is set to R&B star Chris Brown’s hypnotic dance jam “Forever.” And that’s been a real business bonanza for the rights holders as reported by Youtube.

As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the
massive wave of popularity generated by “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” —
in the last week, searches for “Chris Brown Forever” on YouTube have
skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site:

This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on
the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other
Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this new found interest in
downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding
Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music
video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last
week.

So, what does all of this mean? Despite compelling data and studies
around consumer purchasing habits, many still question the promotional
and bottom-line business value sites like YouTube provide artists. But
in the last week, over a year after its release, Chris Brown’s
“Forever” has again rocketed up the charts, reaching as high as #4 on
the iTunes singles chart and #3 on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list.

Quite a story. As my Aussie friends would say Good on Ya Jill and Kevin! I hope you have a joyous and marvelous life together.

TubeMogul, a interesting company that helps you distribute videos around the web, recently asked that question to 11,919 video producers and 1,119 responded. 51% of those said yes they are making money with Internet video earning on average $12.39 per 1,000 views.

This money making group splits into 3 groups. Group one (47.4% of the money makers) relies entirely on third parties like YouTube to monetize their content. At the other extreme, group two (23.4% of the money makers) rely on their own exclusive direct sales. The rest use a blended approach. I asked TubeMogul if they could determine CPM by group, but have not yet heard back from them.

These money makers seem to use everything they can to make money. Here’s the breakdown by ad format:

So for those of you making videos online, what works best for you?

In Digital Podcast 52, Andrew interviews Jonathan Strietzel, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Big Stage, whose breakthrough technology allows users to create and integrate life-like 3-D avatars of themselves into movies, videogames, commercials and other digital video content using just three digital face photos.

Imagine if you and your friends could star in a music video, famous movie clip, or commercial as realistically as if you were around for the shoot. Jonathan describes the company and the potential that its technology has to transform advertising and the audience relationship with movies, television and videogames.

 

 Digital Podcast 52 [23:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the interview, Jonathan describes his early start as a wunderkind discovered by SoCal VCs (0:00), his insight into the coming importance of personalization as he discovered the technology behind Big Stage (2:45), and how he helped move the technology to become consumer internet capable and fundable (7:05).

He talks about the current business, his monetization model through brands and content partners based on the technology’s dramatic impact on advertising effectiveness (11:35), and what the big media networks are seeing in terms of monetization and CPM rates (16:12). He also describes privacy considerations (17:40) and the other cool non-advertising stuff, like videogaming and short internet adventures, that Big Stage will be making possible (19:05).

Jonathan Strietzel is co-founder and chief creative officer of Big Stage. He brings 10 years of experience as an entrepreneur in the entertainment and technology industries, including founding Stritz Studios, a boutique special effects studio. He has also invented multiple systems for delivering digital advertising and currently holds a U.S. patent for his work in particle-based advertising. In addition, Jonathan has worked with numerous TV studios and Fortune 500 companies, including developing the highly publicized online clue delivery system for NBC’s “Treasure Hunters.” Jonathan graduated from Chapman University with a Bachelor of Science degree.

Technorati Tags: Digital Hollywood, Big Stage, Jonathan Strietzel, Virtual Reality, Avatar, 3D

In what was certainly the funniest and most enjoyable presentation at Web 2.0 Expo, Dan Lyons AKA Fake Steve Jobs, discusses how he came to start the Fake Steve blog and explains why he thinks it works. Thanks to the Web 2.0 team for putting together this video and the other videos from the Web 2.0 Expo.

You can find more videos of the keynote presentations at Web2Expo channel on Blip.TV

Technorati Tags: Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons, Web20Expo

YouTube has given video awards to 12 videos. The categories are Adorable, Comedy, Commentary, Creative, Eyewitness, Inspirational, Instructional, Music, Politics, Series, Short Film, and Sports. The winners get bragging rights, a trophy and an invitation to an event later this year, presumably an awards ceremony.

Which one do you like best?

And the winners are:

Adorable: Laughing Baby

Comedy: Potter Puppet Pals in “The Mysterious Ticking Noise”

Commentary: LonelyGirl15 is Dead!

Creative: The Original Human TETRIS Performance by Guillaume Reymond

Eyewitness: Battle at Kruger

Inspirational: Blind Painter

Instructional: How to solve a Rubik’s Cube (Part One)

Music: “Chocolate Rain” Original Song by Tay Zonday

Politics: Stop the Clash of Civilizations

Series: The Guild – Episode 1: Wake-Up Call

Short Film: my name is lisa

Sports: balloon bowl

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Video Awards, Online Video

YouTube announced the launch of YouTube Everywhere. This opens up YouTube services and functionality to be used on every website or application that wants to integrate with YouTube and use its services. You can set it up so that your users can upload videos to YouTube and never leave your site. You can retrieve your user’s videos and play them on your site, with a player that you get to brand. You can add/edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc).

This move means that anyone can build a YouTube like capability into their website or application and take advantage of YouTube’s full capabilities and you can do it for free. This is an amazing tool kit that will allow people to build all kinds of interesting applications. All of this will be great to see.

There are also a number of other big implications:

• It increases rate at which GooTube will become the central repository for video content on the web.
• Google will become the largest content delivery network we’ve ever seen. This is bad news for the other players in video distribution business, such as Britecove or Maven Networks.
• And it could be bad news for players such as Akamai, if Google gets way ahead and opens up its content delivery network further.
• GooTube will collect enormous amounts of data about what’s happening with video everywhere on the net and that will be really valuable to advertisers.
• Everything everywhere will speed up a lot, and that means publishers and developers better figure out how they compete in that world.
• Flash/Adobe just increased in value as this will increase the dominance of Flash even further.

Here’s the video version of the release:

Leave a comment with other implications or applications you would like to see people build with this.

You can find more discussion at Techmeme.

Click here follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/alexnesbitt

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google, online video

Are you ready for an online video show that tracks what’s going on with online celebrities?

Pop17, promises just that.

Pop17 is a two-to-three minute online daily video show covering the furthest reaches of online mico-celebrity and internet fame. Who are these new influentials? What are their stories? How have they leveraged their online successes? These are the kinds of questions we will explore everyday at Pop17.

Sarah Meyers, the shows host, surveyed a random group of people in Washington Square Park about these online micro-celebrities.

Her main finding:

It’s surprising how many people I surveyed knew little to nothing about anyone famous online.

I hope the core tech super fans provide high enough CPMs to support what might be a small, but very focused and perhaps important audience.

The show is sponsored by Tech Crunch, Perkett PR and Virgin America. New shows will air Monday through Thursday, with a live edition on Mogulus every Friday at 3pm ET.

Technorati Tags: sarah meyers, pop17, online celebrities

How to get podcasts into iTunes and how to get more than just the most recent show to download are questions I get frequently.

In the past, I have used the descriptions in the Digital Podcast Forums, but I thought I would create a short video tutorial that explains how to get podcasts into your iTunes player, download multiple episodes and delete podcasts from iTunes.

If you just got your new iPod and want to get some podcasts into iTunes so you can listen to them on your computer or iPod this video is for you.

Technorati Tags: how to get podcasts into itunes, how to get podcasts on iPod

 

 Digital Podcast 29 [5:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This video from The Digital Lounge covers three different sources of free video for your portable player: TiVo, your own DVD collection, and Windows Media Center. Watch and learn how you can easily use the video content you already have to fill up your media library in either the Zune software or iTunes.

Technorati Tags: tivo, zune, ipod, video, dvd, ipod movie downloads, zune movie downloads