Pruane2Forever is one of the most subscribed channels on YouTube. Pruane2Forever is best known as the Canadian kid with braces that vents about movies, rap music, Bill O’Reilly, and life in general.
The kid also refers to himself as “Sexman.” The reviews seem serious, but actually come off as pretty entertaining. As a matter of fact, I find Pruane2Forever more entertaining to watch than LonelyGirl15. I think this kid should get some sort of book and movie deal. In one video, Pruane2Forever vents about rapper 50 Cent for endorsing Vitamin Water, make-up, and sex toys.
In response, 50 Cent decided to befriend Pruane2Forever. Below is the video. Pruane2Forever’s thoughts on 50 Cent has forever been changed. In the video, Pruane2Forever even uses 50 Cent’s typical catchphrase when referring to his rap group “G-G-G-G-Unit!”
In the last 5 days a YouTube video received about 5.5 million views. The video features a bunch of worms that formed into a disgusting cluster in a North Carolina sewer. The cluster looked so abnormal that at first people believed the worm cluster to be an unknown life form. The life form even reacts to light.
Raleigh environmental coordinator Ed Buchan confirmed that the creature is a tubifex worm colony that attach themselves to roots. The worms then work themselves into weak points in pipes.
“The worms naturally occur in sewage and pond sediment and are actually sold both live and dried as fish food in pet stores. He said other staff members in the department have seen it before, although sightings aren’t particularly common. ‘I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them,’ he said. ‘We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.’”
How this video was able to get millions of views is even more of a mystery than the worms themselves.
The problem with services that report the analytics and visits for many websites is that they don’t have direct access to server logs. Whenever Comscore or Nielsen reports the numbers for a website, it is usually an underestimated number. Earlier this month, it was reported that YouTube streamed about 6.5 billion video views. Based on this number, it comes out to be about 200-225 million video views per day.
However a source at Google reported to TechCrunch that the actual figure is about 1.2 billion views per day across the world. Unlike many other video content websites, Google has not really reported the numbers before. In the past Comscore has admitted that they can only estimate based on available data.
Given the bandwidth and storage that is required to run YouTube, the cost of keeping the site online is pegged to be around $2 million per day. If there are really 1.2 billion video views and about 30,000 hours of footage being uploaded per day, I wouldn’t be surprised if it costs more than that.
Every day there is about 30,000 hours of video footage uploaded to YouTube. The amount of bandwidth and storage space needed for this upload rate, YouTube is costing Google about $2 million per day to keep running. That is about $730 million per year. YouTube currently isn’t making as much as it costs, but it is getting there.
In April, about 16.8 billions were viewed on the Internet in the United States. This is a 16% increase over the month before. The reason for the surge from March was primarily due to YouTube’s growth. Google accounts for about 41% of the online video market. In April, there were about 513 million MySpace Video views and 397 million video views on Hulu. Yahoo! Video has about 355 million video views.
According to Alexa, YouTube is the #3 most visited website in the world following Google and Yahoo!, respectively. The websites behind YouTube are Facebook, Windows Live, MSN.com, Wikipedia, Blogger, Baidu, and Yahoo! Japan, MySpace, and Google India.
In April Universal and YouTube announced that they are teaming up on a music video website project coined Vevo. Today Sony Music Entertainment joined the Vevo venture. Vevo will be launching later this year.
Between Universal and Sony, they represent artists such as Alicia Keys, Eminem, AC/DC, Lady Gaga, Akon, The Killers, The Black Eyed Peas, etc. Warner Music and EMI have not yet planned on signing to Vevo yet. Vevo will have music videos and possibly reality shows.
YouTube will handle the back-end of Vevo and the music labels will provide the music videos. The President of Vevo will most likely be Universal Music executive Rio Caraeffas.
As the cost of buying larger screen TVs are lowering in cost, the need for consumer-friendly Internet video interfaces are becoming more in demand. Watching music videos on YouTube and network shows on Hulu from a laptop connected to a large screen TV is becoming very customary.
This past January YouTube introduced a way to watch YouTube videos on a Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3. Now the company has created a new interface of their service for large screen TVs, YouTube XL. The quality of the videos isn’t any different, but the YouTube XL interface allows you to navigate around the website much easier.
Some of the features of YouTube XL include a large menu on the left hand side. After clicking on a video, there is continuous play of the related videos. The video control buttons has a much larger size too.
The only thing I don’t like about the new service is that the quality of the video is not much different. I tried watching a few videos on a 27″ TV, but it did not look that great. Perhaps YouTube will start adding more HD videos in the various categories.
4chan is a forum where hackers make designated online attacks on celebrities and popular services. Recently 4chan users were notified about Salma Hayek’s MobileMe Account login information. 4chan users also built a Twitter bot that gathered thousands of followers in an attempt to beat Ashton Kutcher and CNN to the first million followers. This time 4chan users decided to attack YouTube.
Anyone that searched for Hannah Montana or Jonas Brothers may have noticed some inappropriate content show up. 4chan planned this attack on YouTube as a protest against the removal of audio from copyrighted music videos. Some of the links connected to those videos were linked to websites that asked visitors to download malware too.
Google responded quickly in removing the offensive videos but warned that there could be a few videos left. About 20 hours of video are added to YouTube per minute so it is difficult to keep tabs on every single video being uploaded.
Yesterday I wrote about the video in which two former Domino’s Pizza employees made a disgusting video of them making food. One of the employees put some of the ingredients up his nose and placed it back in the food. The Internet was furious about the video and it spread like wildfire.
Domino’s made the right PR move by personally responding to the video. Patrick Doyle, President of Domino’s gave a message about the video above and mentioned that there are felony warrants out for the arrest of the two employees and that individual store in Conover, North Carolina was shut down and sanitized. The company will also be re-examining their hiring practices.
Tom Monaghan founded Domino’s Pizza in Ann Arbor, Michigan around 1960. Today Domino’s is a $400 million public company with over 8,000 stores employing over 10,000 people across the globe. With that many employees working for Domino’s, it is hard to track some of the “bad apples” that have the potential to tarnish the company’s image. It could happen at any of the stores.
In this particular Domino’s store in North Carolina, a couple of dirty employees filmed a video and uploaded it on YouTube. In the video, the Domino’s employees taint the food by sticking some of the ingredients up their nose. The Consumerist wrote about this video earlier this week. The two teenagers took down the video, but it was re-uploaded by someone that downloaded the video. Dominos’ VP of Communications Tim McIntyre reported that the franchise owners fired those two teenagers immediately.
Although I feel bad for Domino’s having to deal with this mess, I like the fact that social media was able to bring down punishment upon those who deserve it. Personally I think that just being fired is not enough of a punishment. They could just move on to another restaurant and do the same thing there. I think their names should be released and they should be banned from working at any place that serves food. Give the guy a desk job, he can put all the boogers he wants under the desk there.
According to a study by Credit Suisse, Google is spending about $2 million per day to run YouTube. That comes out to cost about $753 million per year. Google bought YouTube a couple of years ago for $1.65 billion and had to deal with all the litigation that came with it.
Between the storage, bandwidth, content acquisition, revenue sharing, and other overhead costs, it adds up to about $2,064,054 a day according to InternetEvolution.com. YouTube’s actual revenue is not available but financial estimates believe it to be around $90 - $240 million. Based on all of this financial data, YouTube still has a long way to go in order to actually make a profit.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary YouTube and Universal Music Group are planning to launch a music video website together in order to increase both of their revenues. The Universal Music channel on YouTube is already one of the most subscribed to on the video website. The combined website will be called Vevo.
This deal is a major boost for YouTube because the video website is getting pressured to find additional revenue streams and is taking a lot of flack for not being able to pay fees for the rights to use their music and music videos.
Vevo will be wholly owned by Universal and it will feature higher quality videos than what is seen on YouTube itself. “The rationale is to help make Vevo a place that brands feel more comfortable,” stated Rio Caraeff, EVP of Universal’s eLabs division.
Universal hopes that Vevo will be comparable to Hulu. Vevo will syndicate videos through their platform called Vevo Music Network. Universal is planning to partner with EMI and Sony Music Group who have already renewed their contracts with YouTube. Partnering with Warner Music Group will be slightly more challenging because they have not been able to make a deal with YouTube in the past.
As you all are aware, sometimes you are sent a link to a video that may be of interest but instead you get a music video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. This meme is called Rickrolling. As a matter of fact, the Never Gonna Give You Up video has been watched over 150 million times on YouTube. This is great for Rick Astley because it gives him more publicity and possibly more sales of his music, but what did YouTube itself pay the songwriter of Never Gonna Give You Up? About $16.
“There was I sitting at Christmas thinking, ‘I must have made a few bob this year with the old Rickrolling’,” stated Pete Waterman, the 62 year old British producer and songwriter of Never Gonna Give You Up. “I rang my publisher and they said ‘You’ll be all right’, until I saw the royalty statement. £11. If 154 million plays means £11, I get more from Radio Stoke playing Never Gonna Give You Up than I do from YouTube.”
Waterman’s fortune itself is worth about £47 million ($68 million). Waterman compared the royalties paid as foreign workers in Dubai. He made less on YouTube and Google than these foreign workers did from the Bahrain government.
Over the past week, YouTube was temporarily banned in China. It was unbanned again yesterday. The reason why it was banned was because China was criticized over a video that was released by the Tibetan government in exile. The video showed Chinese security officers beating handcuffed Tibetans.
People in Beijing found a way to get around the block by using special software to enter the site through a proxy server. This is a common way to access websites when they are banned by the government which happens often.
The Chinese government quickly responded to the alleged video. They stated that the police beating a Tibetan to death in the video was a lie concocted by supporters of the Dalai Lama.
YouTube works great on the iPhone, but it seems to be not as easy to use through their mobile site (m.youtube.com) when using Windows Mobile phones. However there is now an app you can download for WinMo on the Mobile YouTube site and supposedly it is supposed to be a lot faster now.
While making the app faster, YouTube has been able to increase the quality of the videos. Below is a video demo of the new app in use. Other features that have been improved on the new YouTube mobile application is easier video viewing, improved WiFi streaming, and support for more mobile devices.
Universal Music Group and YouTube are close to a final agreement on partnering to create a Hulu-like music video website. The service is currently code-named Vevo. If the deal goes through, Vevo would become the largest music oriented website on the web. A final deal may not be reached for several weeks.
Universal’s music videos have been viewed 3.5 billion times. Doug Morris, CEO and Chairman of Universal spearheaded the YouTube partnership campaign. This video website would give Universal a bit more leverage in setting up a revenue sharing agreement with YouTube. Sony, Warner Music, and EMI have also been approached regarding the new potential music video website.
