Have a look at Hulu. Dorm Life is #62 overall in popularity for the month of August 2008. That’s 62nd of the 525 shows Hulu carries, all genres, most of them relatively expensive TV shows (see screenshot below).
True, the swirl of activity on the online video front is frenzied enough to bewilder a competent air-traffic control crew, but Tilzy.tv’s Colin McDonald has it right in calling out the NYT’s Virginia Heffernan for the confusion evident in her muddle-headed Sunday Magazine piece on web video series. Essentially, McDonald shows that Heffernan doesn’t know how to distinguish between an episodic web series, an online extension of a broadcast network show, and a multipart documentary. She cites as examples a handful of series that are no longer running.
Chris Albrecht over at NewTeeVee finishes the job, though I’m not sure I agree with his take on 3-to-5 minute episodes not sticking because they’re too long for quick viral-style closure but too short for TV sitcom/drama-style schedule annexation. I’d argue that, as fully developed pieces of a larger entity that can be snacked on or devoured whole [shown by the way people are watching Dorm Life on Hulu] they’re the ultimate engagement weapon. Just wait till distributors, brands and producers figure out how to market these things. Right now they’re still being handled like “online TV-like shows,” as the NYT share-module headline awkwardly calls them.
And I have to tsk-tsk just a little in reaction to Albrecht’s headline. I’m guessing 20% of all rebuttals to Heffernan’s columns start with “Yes, Virginia…”
August 13th, 2008 by Josh | Posted in video | Comments
This Inside Online Video starts with the exciting nugget at the heart of a recent Forrester Research report: prime-time TV advertising time goes for $25 per thousand views (CPM), while the best-produced shows garner $70 CPM on the Web. That sounds about right to us. Also nice to hear that this year’s online video ad spending of $471 million will be increasing over the coming years to $7.2 billion in 2012.
….Another bee video from Attention Span Media uses humor, and a tad bit of bleeped out vulgar language, to make its point. The video – that doesn’t appear to be sanctioned by the official honeybee web site — features actors dressed as bees talking to the camera and urging humans to save them.
The following internal email thread provides a peek into Attention Span Media’s rigorous and highly scientific project-naming process…
- [10am] GARRETT: We need to decide on the name for the show. Let’s get it done by the end of the day and register the domain.
[3:14pm] JIM: After looking at our available name options, the favorite and therefore winner of the long, drawn-out Music Blogger naming process is “Every Good Name Is Already Taken”. Garrett, can you register everygoodnameisalreadytaken.com? Thanks. By the way, there is something poetic about the fact “Every Good Name is Taken” was already taken.
[3:30pm] GARRETT: As of 3:28PM PST, Every Good Name is Already Taken, officially, now that EveryGoodNameIsAlreadyTaken.com is taken.
Yours,
Garrett (A Good Name, Taken) Law
[3:31pm] BRIAN: I was also thinking that “Every Good Name” could be the name of the Web Series. I like the idea of the Blog/magazine that the characters write for being called “Every Good Name is Already Taken,” but I think these characters (the writers of the blog/magazine) would refer to it as “Every Good Name” and so should/would the viewers of the show. So…. I think we should also get everygoodname.com (which appears to be available) and refer to the show as “Every Good Name” (which is an abbreviated version of what the blog/mag is called). Thoughts?
[3:34pm] GARRETT: So now, Every Good Name is taken by us, meaning apparently that my previous email stating that every good name is already taken wasn’t totally accurate. Hopefully now, it is.
[3:42pm] BRIAN: Haha. Thanks, Garrett. We will let you know when we change our mind again.
The Huffington Post, which has overtaken the Drudge Report as the most-visited news website in the world, gave shout-outs to ASM’s Honey Bee Mystery not once, but twice.
The second article states “there is, bizarrely, a trend of disappearing bee videos,” citing ours and the Bee-Boy dance crew drops dead video Goodby Silverstein & Partners did for Haagen-Dazs. Yes, there is!
Attention Span Media’s Honey Bee Mystery, a tongue-in-cheek PSA about the mass disappearance of honeybees in recent years, hit #14 on the most-watched-Web-videos-in-the-universe chart on July 11, according to Vidmeter. It was at the top of YouTube’s “featured videos” list for most of the day and pulled in over 180,000 views in 24 hours. As of today it’s at 268,000 views and counting.
