Timely post on NTV that goes back to the essential question for web video: what is a view?
This time, the videos in question are part of a new web series, Imaginary Bitches, starring All My Children actress Eden Reigel:
“Pointing to the inbound links on each IB vid on YouTube, our tipster noted the high number of views coming from suspicious MySpace profiles. For example, Episode 1 links include 4,463 views from Pam/Jenna (a fake Office profile). Episode 7 links include 18,938 views from Leona Lewis (a UK pop artist). There are several more examples, with each MySpace profile showing the video in the comments field, never embedded by the actual profile owner. Sometimes the videos appear in comments far removed from the profile’s front page.
Andrew Miller, the series creator and writer, denies any wrongdoing.”
Whether or not someone is pumping up the numbers is less of an issue than whether or not one can confirm or deny the validity of a view at all. Until someone figures this out web video will continue to struggle to find ways to cashify.
Tags: all my children, Arts, eden reigel, imaginary bitches, Leona Lewis, myspace, NTV, Office, video, Video clip, webisode, webisodes, webseries, youtube
Uncategorized | admin | 
July 24, 2008 4:44 pm | 
Comments (3)
Ok, that might be a bit of an exaggaration but one of the things that makes web video tough to cashify is figuring out just what to charge for. What does getting 1,000,000 “views” on YouTube really mean.
A recent dust-up with some Avril Levigne supporters creating autoplay embeds on her video “Girlfriend” so that it would beat out “The Evolution of Dance” to become the so-called most popular video on YouTube.
According to NTV, this might have caused a change in policy over at YouTube:
“…we have reason to believe the site has stopped counting views from videos set to play automatically on pages around the web. We first took notice of the issue when popular producers contacted us saying they’d seen a dramatic drop-off in the number of views they receive for new videos. It’s possible that YouTube has adjusted more than one aspect of its view count methods, and it’s also possible that the view count methods are just malfunctioning. But enough people are mentioning the autoplay issue that we think there’s a good chance that’s the issue.”
While it’s a good step for YouTube to take I don’t think it is going to make much of a difference in the overall scheme of things. There will still be plenty of people out there able to game the system and the actual value of a view will remain in the eye of the beholder.
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.
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