Looking at Video on the Web with Ken McCarthy

It seems like a hundred years ago.

Overnight, it became dead simple to copy and post video to the Internet and everyone started doing it.

Copyright owners wailed and gnashed their teeth. Can you blame them? Suddenly, it was easier to copy and repost their uber-expensive products than it was to make paper copies. (At least you have to pay to make photocopies.)

To get the ball rolling, Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube.  (That lawsuit is still pending I believe.)

In the meantime, someone got intelligent.

Read more…

Well, I have one.

A genuine viral video

How about 1,234,411 views for one page in September – with no advertising, no SEO, no nothing? Just raw viral power. 

Just in case you didn’t read that right, that’s over ONE MILLION TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND views for one page in one month.

Now that I am a genuine viral marketing "expert", here’s what I’ve learned…

Read more…

We did it.

We took an important subject that the media wants to ignore and put it – and kept it  – at the top of YouTube’s "New and Politics" charts.

As I write this, the video – "The Truth about Katrina" – is the #10 highest rated video in this category of this month. Amazing when you think about what we’re up against – McCain, Obama, Palin, Wall Street melt down, etc. etc. and the fact that the Katrina anniversary and Hurricane Gustav are long over.

The underdog – in this case the people of New Orleans and Southern Louisiana – can win…if the underdog has some Internet savvy.

Speaking of savvy, YouTube is adding so many cool "bells and whistles" that it’s hard for me to keep up.

Can anyone point us to a good online resource (maybe hidden somewhere on YouTubes’s site) that goes into the fine points of creating and customizing a YouTube channel and using all the other new stuff they’re offering (text annotation, automatic transfer to another video, click from video to a web site)

The speed of change in this medium has swamped my ability to keep up. If you’ve got anything to share on this point, I’m sure fellow SystemVideoBlog readers will appreciate it. I know I will.

(Please limit posts to this subject.)

Thanks.

Ken

In July, my "hobby" site broke one million views per month.

The numbers are in for August.

We did it again PLUS 10%.

I’ll be revealing the formula I used to create this amazing traffic magnet at the London, UK System Intensive and the Chicago System Boot Camp.

Cash required to start: zero. My total time commitment: 15 minutes per day.

Revenue: Currently just a hair away from five figures net per month. And growing at 10% per month. Perfectly scalable. Could be ten times the size with no additional work required and the market has at least that much room to grow.

A few days ago, I accepted what sounded like a totally insane challenge. 

A friend asked if I could help promote a video I made for her group on YouTube.

"What category?" I asked.

"News and politics," she said.

"Let me get this straight. The Democrats are right in the middle of their convention. The Republicans are starting their own soon. All the TV news, all the newspaper headlines, all the blogs are focused on the conventions and you want to go up against that?"

(I mean, really. Can you imagine anything more impractical, more pie-in-the-sky, more unlikely to ever happen?)

Then she hit me with the zinger:

"It’s for New Orleans."

"Oh…OK…Let’s do it!"

24 hours ago, we had a zero ranking on YouTube. Now look at where we’re at…On the top line of the highest rated videos, right next to the Democrats and the Republicans.

Let’s see…the candidates have spent tens of millions of dollars to promote themselves. The news media threw in, what, maybe another $100 million worth of free exposure. They have thousands of minions and operatives at their beck and call.

And we’re right up there…for zero dollars…in our spare time…all from a lap top.

That’s Internet power baby. The System Way.

Can your guru do that?  Can they go up against the real world’s biggest media guns, call it, win it and do it in real time?

Sometime next week, I’ll explain how YOU can do this too – and you won’t have to touch your credit card to learn.

Meanwhile, here’s the video. Soon we’re going to get knocked down to the "Weekly" top rated instead of "Today’s" top rated so I’m still hustling for  traffic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k

Check it out: Bottom right hand corner.  It’s called "The Katrina Myth."

Best placement money can buy – but we got it free.

We hit a million plus viewers again in the month of August, but that’s not what I’m really excited about.

A friend and I made this video from scratch – from concept, to script, to production, to being seen by thousands online – in just three weeks from start to finish.

All the footage was "found" on the Internet and it was a very part time effort for both of us.

I’d like you to click through to YouTube and rank it (with five stars), favorite it, and comment on it.

If readers of this blog generate at least 20,000 YouTube views, I’ll interview the guy who did the production and post it for you.

If you guys generate 50,000 or more visits, I’ll explain how I get 1 million plus visitors to a video site working just 15 minutes a day.

You have seven days to make your numbers. Good luck – and as you’ll see – this is for a good cause.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k

After two years of very part-time experimentation, I’ve come up with a formula that this past month (July 2008) generated over 1,000,000 video views. 

Better yet, traffic for the test site is growing at 10% per month – and it’s all free –  so next year this time,  the site will be doing well over 2,000,000 views per month, unless I get ambitious and start pushing it a little.

Total time investment to keep the thing going and growing: 15 minutes per day.

More details later, but here’s the screen shot:

Click here for experimental site results

I had friends who played in virtual worlds in the late 1970s (they needed mainframe access back then.)

I didn’t get it then – and I don’t get it now – but whether I get it or not doesn’t matter.

This year $1 billion was invested in various "virtual world" ventures.  OK, there’s a lot of hot money around right now, but it can’t ALL be dumb money.

Also, if "community" is the key to the Internet, what could be more of a community than a place where you completely immerse yourself in another world with fellow virtual world inhabitants.

Two resources for you if you want to keep up-to-date with what’s going on:

!. Virtual World Management

The virtual world industry is big enough to have its own conferences, expos and industry analysts.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/

2. Machinima

What is it?

It’s "animated filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3-D environment."

Frankly, I’ve yet to see a good machinima (I haven’t looked all that hard), but clearly this is a medium to watch.  It’s growing fast and the current fan base is very passionate.

You can get a crash course here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima

Ken

A bit long-winded (he’s an academic) but when he finally makes his point at the end, it’s a pretty good one.

Actually, John Walker, co-founder founder of AutoCAD, made this same point brilliantly way back in the early nineties. The folks who are going to make a killing in software, he said, are the folks who create tools that let people make their own stuff.

There’s so much going on in Internet video, just tracking it could be a full time job.

Unfortunately, I already have a full time "job" (actually a couple of them): running a business; organizing and hosting the annual System Seminar; counseling non-profits in New Orleans.

So the number of posts to the blog has suffered, though I do think the quality has been sky high.

In fact, we accomplished the most important thing: alerting Internet marketers to the impending breakthroughs that were on track to put Internet video on the map as a major force in Internet marketing. Folks who took our advice were well positioned when the reality we predicted (with a pretty good degree of precision) arrived.

Now video on the Internet has practically become "business as usual."

With that in mind, let’s talk with a real Internet video veteran, a guy who, while he was at Microsoft, was already looking at video’s online potential seriously TWELVE years ago.

Hundreds of high level, high stakes online video presentations later, he has a lot of practical advice to share with us:

http://www.thesystemblog.com/2008/03/lon-naylor—vi.html