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?

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

[tags]YouTube, Google, online video[/tags]

Kina Grannis, an aspiring singer songwriter, caught my attention along with a lot of the tech community with a post over at Digg. The post linked to Kina’s YouTube page and had a song called “Gotta Digg”. The Digg fans went crazy for Kina and voted over 10,000 times for collection of posts linking to her blog and to the video at YouTube. Kina’s YouTube traffic skyrocketed up and “Gotta Digg” has gone over 180,000 views.

Kina is trying to win a contest and NEEDS YOUR VOTE. The contest is called Crash the Superbowl and the winner gets a recording contract and their video played on the Super Bowl broadcast. Kina was kind enough to spend some time with me on the phone discussing her career, the contest and the impact of her most recent experience with social media.

 

 Digital Podcast 28 [9:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If you want to hear more of Kina’s music you can visit her YouTube page, KinaGrannis.com or sign up for voting reminders at a site she set up for video blogging about the contest called Two Weeks for Kina.

Kina also has some CDs for sale on iTunes including One More in the Attic, sincerely, me and In Memory of the Singing Bridge

Gotta Digg Video

The Myspace Video

So GO VOTE FOR KINA.

[tags]Crash the Super Bowl, Kina Grannis, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, social media, social media marketing[/tags]

The British Monarchy have created a channel on YouTube. Queen Elizabeth ll’s Christmas day video will now be available on YouTube at the Royal Channel. It will be interesting to see how long it takes other world leaders to realize that they have a direct channel to the people via the internet. Who needs CNN when you can have your own channel.

[tags]YouTube, Queen Elizabeth, Royal Channel, online video[/tags]

Google has now integrated Youtube video into Adsense. This is straight from the Google blog Inside AdSense:

AdSense isn’t just for ads anymore; it’s also a place to get video content for your site — and earn extra revenue at the same time.

We’re excited about the launch of video units — a new way to enrich your site with quality, relevant video content in an embedded, customizable player. Simply embed a snippet of code and have relevant YouTube partner content streamed to your site. You can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your site content. Companion and text overlay ads are relevant and non-intrusive. To further blend the YouTube player into your site, you can also customize the color scheme and layout as well as choose from three different player sizes.

Here’s the video:

The blog post says “Video Units” should be visible on the Adsense Setup page, but it’s not showing up there for me so they may be still in the process of rolling it out.

UPDATE: Here’s the what the Video Unit looks like. They also have a smaller and bigger one.

[tags]adsense, google, youtube, video units, video ads[/tags]