Last Thursday, Barack Obama’s views from his official videos on YouTube totaled 778,373, more than seven times John McCain’s total (102,064). Although some of this is doubtlessly due to VP rumors, much of the spike was caused by Obama’s foray into attack ads with “Seven,” which had 464,883 views yesterday, knocking Obama out of a recent lull in which McCain was consistently beating him in daily views for the first time since 2/11/08, and 11/29/07 before that.
Brian Conley, creator of the video-blog “Alive In Baghdad,” was detained by Chinese authorities in Beijing while demonstrating with Students For a Free Tibet (below is one of their typical protests–unfortunately, footage of the actual detention is unavailable). We are proud that Brian’s vlog is distributed through us and our thoughts and prayers go out to him.
Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library TV delivered a rousing keynote address at New Media Expo (below). Among other comments he made at the expo, he flattered us with this one: “You’re an idiot if you’re not using TubeMogul.”
Attention, filmmakers! MetaCafe and MicroCinema are co-sponsoring a film festival, entitled MetaFest, which is accepting submissions of short films until September 10. The Grand Prize is $5,000 cash. The festival is online, but MetaCafe will also be having a theater screening in San Francisco, which will have its own, audience-selected winner. MORE HERE.
While you are visiting MetaCafe, you might also want to opt-into their revenue-sharing program, Producer Rewards.
We are attending New Media Expo in full force, and would love to see you there! Here is what we are doing:
Displaying: Booth 208. We will be showing off new features currently in development, as well as giving out American Apparel T-Shirts.
Ad-Hoc Partying. We splurged on a suite, and there’s sure to be some (wholesome) mischief. Subscribe to our Twitter feed to get the down-low on when and where; we would love to have you by.
A few weeks back, Silicon Alley Insider asked us how many of the content creators using us are monetizing their videos. To answer, we sent out a survey to over 11,000 of our active users, and this latest study is the result. Among other things, we found that the average CPM (which varied from pennies to over $100) is $12.63, 20.4% of all users are selling their own ads into videos and the market seems split on the best ad format. Also, about a third of those monetizing are mid-tier and are struggling to sell ads. MORE HERE.
As we reported here, John McCain surpassed Barack Obama in daily YouTube views for the first time since the primaries last week. After being forced to remove his popular “Love” video because of a copyright claim by Warner Music Group (which we noticed last Friday and Silicon Alley Insider covered here), McCain managed to make another video go viral, an attack ad making fun of Obama’s celebrity status (below). Apparently, McCain’s (sustainable?) strategy for making videos go viral is to make fun of Obama. A little lighthearted ad hominem never hurt anyone, right?
