This is sort of the perfect web story. I mentioned “Fred” about a week ago. He is a YouTube phenom racking up 7-figure view counts on nearly every video he puts out. I wondered just who he was and whether or not he was the product of some ad house.
Well, NTV got the dirt:
““Fred” is actually 14-year old Lucas Cruikshank, and while age ain’t nuthin’ but a number, these other stats might impress you: According to Cruikshank’s rep, Cruikshank and his two cousins made a total of $14,000 on YouTube for 7 million video plays on non-Fred projects during the month of February. Cruikshank did 23 million video plays in May on his own with Fred…”
They even got an interview. Good reading.
There is a neat piece in NTV about the battle to be the #1 Most Viewed Video on YouTube. For quite some time that spot has been held by a video called “The Evolution of Dance” clocking it at 90,071,493 as of 6:00 PM on June 26th.
The #2 spot is held by popstar Avril Lavigne and her video “Girlfriend” at 89,284,333.
Avril’s “people” really want her to be #1 and they are willing to do anything to get her there. This includes:
“To fire up the all the Sk8ter Bois and girls for this web video battle royale, the somewhat-creepily titled AvrilBandAids.com has set up a “refresher” page to try and game the system. Keep the page open and it will refresh the Lavigne video page on YouTube every 15 seconds.”
This all begs the question, what do these views mean? And if you can trick the system so easily does your view rank even matter?
Obviously, legitimate metrics are going to be key to increasing our ability to cashify our new media content. For now, YouTube view count seems to be a respected number but if things continue like this it won’t mean much for long.
Here is the Evolution of Dance Video (the Avril video has embedding disabled at her request…)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg&hl=en]
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June 28, 2008 11:24 pm | 
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