Our own “Dr. TubeMogul,” Eugene Lee, just forwarded me his compilation of photos from YouTube Live (below), which amounts to a veritable who’s-who of online video. It’s worth noting that the first photo is of our first user, Chris Pirillo. Enjoy.
We are proud to be sponsoring the Portable Film Festival, an international user-generated festival of short films that takes place online. Film categories include “Short Film,” “Music Video,” “Animated,” “First-Hand Capture” and more. Winners are decided entirely by user ratings, giving everyone the chance to help dictate the outcome. Voting opens August 1, and closes midnight, August 31. For those interested, the festival starts accepting entries on January 1st, 2009, although you can register now.
Thanks to our users, we recently surpassed one billion views from videos distributed by TubeMogul. To mark the occasion, we created a special new badge that dynamically displays any video producer’s cross-site, cumulative views. Click here to get yours!
Popular video bloggers Rhett & Link (click here for their TubeMogul Marketplace profile) have a funny new weekly series, “Surrogate Sharers,” sponsored by Starburst. As the title implies, the videos convey messages too awkward to deliver in person (i.e. “Dude–I’m dating your sister”). Here’s my favorite:
AT&T is sponsoring an online series titled “Lost In America” (not to be confused with the excellent 1985 Albert Brooks movie of the same name). The show features prominent video blogger (and TubeMogul user) iJustine and Karen Nguyen.
I was cleaning out some (now-stale) presidential race viewership data when I discovered that videos including the terms “John McCain” or “Barack Obama” in the tags/keywords appeared to be disappearing from YouTube at an alarming rate. Were people deleting videos about the candidates now that the election is over?
No, it turns out. The real reason for the decline is that some YouTube users were using the candidates’ names as keywords in totally irrelevant videos to inflate their views and, now that the election is over, were swapping out the candidates’ names for other of-the-moment keywords (i.e. “James Bond”).
On election day eve, 7.89% of the videos mentioning the candidates in the tags were of this misleading ilk. Some prominent examples of abusers include Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” and “Dramatic Chipmunk,” who, apparently, was not “dramatic” enough.
Sphere: Related ContentThe office is buzzing over our recent acquisition of Illumenix, an in-depth video metrics startup. Illumenix’s suite of patent-pending measurement tools, which can be set up in any flash player within minutes, are going to be wrapped up into something we are calling TubeMogul InPlay. If you host your own Flash video, here are some of the metrics we now offer:
What else do we gain from the deal? The value of Illumenix’s brain-trust of executives and engineers can’t be overstated, and we are excited to have them working in our Emeryville, California offices. Here’s our first team photo, taken at our Halloween Party last week:
Some final tallies: