Gideon Yu is the former chief financial officer at Facebook. In late March, Yu had suddenly quit and it was uncertain where he was headed to next. According to a source with TechCrunch, Yu has joined Khosla Ventures as a General Partner.
Yu was previously an SVP in Finance and Yahoo! and he was also the former CFO of YouTube. Before joining Khosla, Yu worked for a short while at Sequoia Capital. He was one of the main reasons why Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.
Khosla recently raised $1 billion in a fund to invest in various startups in the mobile, Internet, science, and clean-tech sectors.
Amit Chowdhry | August 25, 2009 | 283 views | Comments Categorized under YouTube
Last year YouTube launched a service called Partner Program. This allowed YouTube content owners and highly prolific users to make money from their videos. Aside from all the publicity that they receive on YouTube, the content owners would receive a cut from revenue earned from ads on their videos.
This program was only available for select publishers, but now the program is starting to open for individual viral videos. Some of YouTube’s most visited viral videos will receive the benefits of the program such as the people behind Battle at Kruger, David after dentist, and Otters holding hands.
YouTube determines whether a video is eligible for the partner program by looking at the number of views and the video’s compliance with YouTube’s Terms of Service. If a video is eligible, YouTube will send an e-mail to the account holder with a subject that says “Enable Revenue Sharing.” Revenue from the video will be added to the account holder’s Google AdSense account.
It was inevitable that Fred would eventually be replaced on YouTube as the most subscribed YouTube channel. Fred is the kid played by Lucas Cruikshank that edits his voice to be high-pitched and sped up. Fred is also one of the most searched kids on the web.
Fred was replaced by Nigahiga over the weekend. Nigahiga has about 1.392 million subscribers and Fred has about 1.36 million. Above is a video that Nigahiga made to celebrate their victory.
The Southeastern Conference college athletic conference headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama is not a fan of social media. As a matter of fact, the SEC is looking to have all of their athletes banned from using social media such as Twitter, Facebook, TwitPic, etc.
One of the reasons why the SEC possibly wants to have social media banned is because of a contract they have in place with CBS. The problem is that it is hard to make a conference-wide ban on social media because it is a part of our everyday lives.
On top of the Twitter links, the Big 10 encourages users to join their Facebook groups and watch some of the best Big 10 games on Hulu.
I agree with Bret Feddern of BleacherReport when he writes “The SEC should follow the lead of the Big Ten rather than basing its decision making on the fear of what it doesn’t understand.”
Three people in Canada were charged for firing at ducklings on a pond from a vehicle. They uploaded the incident taking place itself on YouTube. The three individuals were immediately charged 16,000 Canadian dollars ($14,500). The police were notified about the video by a bunch of tippers calling the anti-poaching hotline. The three hunters are from Cudworth, Saskatchewan.
The three were charged with careless firearm usage, allowing game meat to spoilt, and hunting waterfowl even though it was not in season. The three were also charged for illegally hunting migratory birds with a rifle. One of the individuals was charged with firing a gun from a vehicle.
The three were identified as David Fraser (30), his brother James Fraser (23), and their brother-in-law Jeremy Rowlands. The three plead guilty earlier this week to 15 counts of violating wildlife protection laws.
David said that at the time they did not know it was a crime. They also did not know that bullets ricocheted off the water. They posted the video online because they thought it was funny. In one scene, one of the shooters fired numerous shots at a duck causing it to become severely dismembered.
A video has been captured and uploaded on YouTube of Dalia Dippolito. The police told Dippolito that her husband had just been killed by a hitman. But here’s the twist: her husband was never actually killed and it was Dippolito herself that called the hitman. Unfortunately for her the hitman was actually an undercover police officer in Boyton Beach, Florida.
The video above shows Dippolito acting that she is sad to hear the news. The police had even set up a fake crime scene around her house. The video that was uploaded on YouTube and will be used against her as evidence when she stands for trial to commit first degree murder.
Before the police taped up her townhome, Dippolito met with the supposed hitman and gave a down payment of $1,200. That would cover the cost of a handgun. Her alibi was that she was going to get her hair done in Boca Raton as an alibi for being away from the house when it all goes down. Dippolito said she would pay $3,000 to follow through with the murder.
When the police officer (hitman) asked her if she was sure, she said “I’m not going to change my mind. I am 5,000% sure I want it done. When I set my mind to something, I get it done.”
Dippolito was brought in to the police station after hearing the news from the police officers that her husband was dead, but to her surprise she found out that her husband Michael was alive in the room next door.
This whole situation reminded me of the movie The Whole Nine Yards. In that movie, Bruce Willis played an experienced hitman and Matthew Perry played a dentist. Matthew Perry’s wife in the movie hired Willis to do a hit on Perry, but (spoiler alert), they became friends instead. In this case, the hitman probably won’t become Dippolito’s friend.
As many of you know by now, our friendly rivals at TechCrunch are building a new electronic tablet called the Crunchpad, slated to be released by this November. Apparently Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge got a chance to play around with the prototype.
Judge tweeted “Just met chief blogger at Tech Crunch. Talked about the Crunchpad and saw a prototype. Great looking device, think it will be a real hit.” This just tells me a couple of things. The Crunchpad may actually have a chance against a rumored upcoming Apple tablet computer. And this also tells me that Best Buy seems to be a bigger fan of TechCrunch than he is with Gizmodo.
An hour before Judge tweeted meeting Arrington, he tweeted that he met YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley to discuss ways to better leverage the video website. He also asked his followers for ideas on what other retailers do to use YouTube well. Here’s my two word answer for Judge: viral videos. The Improv Everywhere group hit over one million views in their viral video of sending a bunch of blue shirt, khaki wearing agents into a Best Buy store.
Amit Chowdhry | August 3, 2009 | 244 views | Comments Categorized under Google, YouTube
YouTube has launched a new service that focuses on local news. At the URL YouTube.com/news, YouTube has a service called News Near You that pulls video clips that are within a 100 mile radius from your IP address location. YouTube insists that this new service will be a boon for local news companies because they plan to share ad revenue with them.
However news companies may be skeptical because this same service could inevitably take people away from the TV. News agencies make a substantial amount of their revenues from money earned from advertising on TV.
There are about 200 news outlet companies that currently are posting news packages on the website and are splitting the revenue with Google.
Amit Chowdhry | July 30, 2009 | 446 views | Comments Categorized under YouTube
A couple of days ago I wrote about how Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz had a wedding video on YouTube that virally accumulated over 12 million views in less than a week. The video features the bridesmaids, groomsmen, bridge, and groom dancing to Chris Brown’s Forever down the aisle.
Given the number of views that took place in a short span of time, the rights holders of the song benefitted from the tools available for having a viral hit on their hands. The rights holders had Click-To-Buy links over the YouTube video which gave users the chance to buy the song through Amazon.com or Apple iTunes.
The click-through rate of the advertisement on the JK Wedding Entrace video was two times the average of other Click-to-Buy ads on other videos. Even one year after the song was released, the Chris Brown song reached as high as the #4 most purchased song on iTunes and #3 on Amazon.com’s best selling MP3s again.
Since YouTube shares the revenue on advertising with the right owners, they made a good chunk of change too.
The Kodak Zi8 will be arriving on the shelves just in time for back-to-school. The Zi8 has 1080p recording, face tracking, image stabilization, 2.5″ LCD display, SD card slot, YouTube uploading, and Facebook support. The Zi8 will be available in colors such as blue, red, and black. The price tag is roughly $180. This would be a great way for your kids to begin their hobby as an amateur videographer.
I believe that choreographed dance moves have a special place in YouTube’s heart when it comes to becoming viral. One of the latest viral hits is “JK Wedding Entrance Dance.” The video has hit over 12 million views from about 100 different clips since arriving on the web on July 19th.
The video features a dance that took place while walking down the aisle at the wedding of Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz. The couple was later interviewed on The Today Show. The song that the wedding dancers decided to perform was Forever by Chris Brown. Brown’s song hit the top 10 charts on iTunes shortly after the wedding video became popular on the Net. The wedding took place at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Another viral video featuring a couple’s first dance on YouTube is when the bride and groom were seen dancing to a slow song, but quickly changed into a choreographed dance to Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-A-Lot. These videos are exactly the reason why YouTube got bought out for a good amount of money.
Amit Chowdhry | July 13, 2009 | 937 views | Comments Categorized under Evian, YouTube
There is something viral about using babies in an advertisement performing adult-like tasks. E*TRADE used babies trading stocks as a viral advertisement. The babies trading stock have millions of views on YouTube. Now Evian has created a hit viral video in the with dancing babies on roller skates.
In about one week the video received about 5 million views and Ad Age reported the video as 2nd place on the viral views chart for the week of June 29. The first place video was given to Air New Zealand for a video in which the airplane staff had uniforms painted on their bodies.
By embedding a link to Evian’s website on the YouTube videos, this may have given the company a major traffic boost over the last week.
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.
