YouTube might have been created as a place to share home movies but it’s now become a platform dominated by professional production companies. The most popular clips tend to be movie previews, television shows, sports segments and even ads that first aired on networks. Joe Public might be uploading the largest number of videos to the site, but it’s the professionals who, not surprisingly, are winning the views. But that doesn’t mean that a few amateurs haven’t managed to turn their YouTube appearance into the beginning of a beautiful career. Michelle Phan’s make-up tips have turned her into a spokeswoman for Lancome while a number of other talented amateurs have also managed to use a video camera to build an audience. Sometimes though, there’s a little more to even those self-starters than meets the eye.

Justin Bieber

YouTube’s biggest success story has to be Justin Bieber, now a mainstream pop idol. The teen star was discovered on the video-sharing site in 2007 when Scooter Braun, a former marketing executive at record label So So Def, stumbled upon one of Bieber’s videos while searching for a different artist. Braun tracked him down, contacted his mother and invited the then-13-year-old to record a demo tape in Atlanta, Georgia. A month later he was picked up by Usher, who outbid Justin Timberlake, and eventually signed with Island Records. After a strange haircut and a big marketing push, Bieber has gone on to become one of the world’s biggest pop stars.

This really was a rare YouTube success story. Although Bieber had taken part in a singing contest the year before, there’s little evidence that he had had any professional training before being picked up by a music company.  The only promotional efforts appears to have been limited to his mother’s prayers for a Christian company to sign him.

Rebecca Black

That isn’t true of Rebecca Black who has now picked up even more YouTube “dislikes” than Bieber. Both Bieber and Black were blessed with pushy parents who helped to shove them up the video charts but while Bieber had to make do with a home movie to accompany a mediocre song, Black’s mother shelled out $4,000 to vanity label Ark Music Factory to produce and promote her daughter’s song “Friday.”

For better or worse, it worked. The song might have become infamous for being bad, but it’s also picked up more than 167 million views and was covered in an episode of Glee. In March, 2011, Forbes estimated that advertising revenues from YouTube alone would have brought in more than  $20,000 and sales on iTunes could have generated another $26,700.

How long the success will last though is a different matter, and the use of a professional company to produce and promote the video has caused its own problems. At the beginning of June, Ark tried charging $2.99 to watch the video and by the middle of the month the original clip had been taken down pending a copyright claim by Rebecca Black.

Shane Dawson

Fortunately, YouTube isn’t only producing the world’s worst songwriters. The site’s biggest earning star is believed to be Shane Dawson, a wannabe comedian and actor whose channel has picked up more than 110 million views and with over 2.5 million subscribers is the most popular on YouTube.

Dawson’s first videos are believed to have been video homework assignments but he’s since gone on to produce a series of spoofs and parodies populated by a host of comedy characters. His channel now lists a professional entourage that includes a film and television agent (supplied by William Morris), a film and television manager, and a merchandising and branding agent. In 2009, advertising income from his YouTube videos was estimated at more than $300,000, and he’s now working on a pilot for a television show based on his characters.

Lucas Cruikshank

Like Shane Dawson, Lucas Cruikshank is another young comic actor who has managed to use YouTube to build an audience, this time for his Fred channel which shows sketches in the life of a fictional six-year-old called Fred Figglehorn. In April 2009, the channel became the first to pick up more than a million subscribers. Cruikshank has since gone on to film Fred: The Movie which aired on Nickelodeon in September 2010. The television station has now created a franchise for the character and has started work on a sequel.

Cruikshank’s rise hasn’t been completely smooth though. His first channel, JKL Productions, was set up with cousins Jon and Katie Smet. That channel now states that Lucas has left the group and deleted all his videos. “We didn’t get in a fight,” his cousins add.

MyKeepon

All of these YouTube stars are selling themselves. MyKeepon, a small robot that dances and responds to touch, has been developed and sold by Wow! Stuff, a marketing company that uses social media sites to look for new ideas. The device, which originally cost $20,000, had been developed by scientists to help autistic children communicate. The UK marketing firm contacted the US developers and is working on a £35 toy version to be released by Christmas. The company’s use of social media sites, including YouTube has won it a National Business Award, fourteen of its products have picked up global distribution through Toys R Us and according to the Daily Telegraph, it also been invited to work with the retailer on product development.

So even if you can’t sing, tell jokes or act like a six-year-old with anger management issues you can still become a success on YouTube.

According to one story, YouTube was born six years ago when early Paypal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim needed a way to share video footage shot at a dinner party at Chen’s San Francisco apartment. But it isn’t true. Karim has denied that the site was born out of a meal at his friend’s place, and Hurley has said that the tale “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible.” In other words, even the origins of a site supposedly created to enable amateur video-sharing are now buried beneath a layer of professional marketing. It’s the kind of subtle professionalism that can be seen most clearly on the site itself where, despite the occasional popularity of finger-biting babies and toilet-trained cats, the most popular footage is produced and distributed not by enthusiasts but by professional content companies. YouTube’s first video might have been of Jawed Karim’s trip to the San Diego zoo, but its number one slots have now mostly been taken over by large media companies using the service to reach audiences directly.

Even many of the videos that appear to be amateur — and many of the clips that were uploaded by amateurs – have professionals behind them or rely on professionals for their popularity. Susan Boyle’s famous rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” for example, which has now picked up almost 70 million views, isn’t a clip of an amateur with a surprisingly good voice singing one of her own songs in the bathroom. It’s a cover from a top musical that appeared in a 2009 episode of Britain’s Got Talent, one of the UK’s most popular television shows. Nor was Gary Brolsma, the YouTube sensation who shot to fame with his lip sync of the Numa Numa song, uploading an original creation to the Web. In fact, by distributing a song he didn’t own, he was breaching copyright. (Not that the copyright owners would have had much reason to complain.) The site’s top performers at time of writing include Amy Winehouse’s flop in Belgrade, a Britney Spears video and an interview with an NBA player. There are precious few entirely amateur videos on the site’s Most Viewed list.

Ten Thousand Professional Partners

There are no reliable figures that compare the ratio of professional content on YouTube to amateur content but the site receives 35 hours of video every minute and says it has 7,000 hours of full-length movies and shows, most of which is presumably professional. The site’s 10,000 partners include Disney, Turner, Univision, Channel 4 and Channel 5. And the 94 percent of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers who have run campaigns on YouTube aren’t uploading footage of their pets or their children. They’re offering ads and footage created with giant production budgets and often featuring well-known stars. The site’s ten-minute upload restriction (now increased to fifteen minutes) was introduced primarily to stop users from uploading entire shows that they didn’t own.

That doesn’t mean that most of the videos submitted to YouTube are sent in by content companies or published by amateurs ripping off content companies. But it should surprise no one that the bulk of the most successful clips on the site have professionals behind them.

In part, that’s because professional content is likely to be better. A large budget buys talent and equipment that produces content that people want to see. But the marketing matters too, another area in which professionals have an advantage. While anyone can create and upload a video to YouTube, that film has to be seen even as thousands of other clips are being put on the site at the same time.

The Marketing Needs Professionals Too

In a 2007 expose of how YouTube marketing really works, Dan Ackerman Greenberg told TechCrunch how he was hired by firms to promote their videos. His methods then included:

• Opening forum discussions, sometimes with multiple identities to create false conversations and attract attention.
• Sending the video link to opted-in email lists.
• Paying bloggers to embed the videos on their pages.
• And using word-of-mouth marketing to help spread awareness of the video.

Today, those methods would likely include social media as well. When Wieden + Kennedy created the Old Spice ads, the company’s promotion strategy included using Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They even pushed it through hacking community 4chan.

It might seem then that YouTube has effectively become an open distribution channel for production studios and advertisers. Instead of going through cable and satellite companies to put their content on screens, they can now go directly to audiences by managing their own YouTube channels — and their efforts are overwhelming the submissions of well-meaning (and attention-seeking amateurs).

But the victory of the professionals on YouTube is neither complete nor necessarily a bad thing. Not only does it mean that viewers aren’t restricted to lolcats and teenage crooners but some YouTube contributors have been paying attention to the best videos on the site and raising their own game to compete. Make-up artist Michelle Phan’s 150 videos, for example, were all created using iMovie on a Macbook Pro. They’ve now been viewed more than 390 million times, winning her sponsorship from Lancôme for whom she is now a spokesperson and whose products now appear in her videos.

The influence flows the other way too. Roger Federer’s trick shot, in which he hits a bottle from the head of a stage hand during a shoot for Gillette, is clearly a piece of advertising created for the cosmetics company. But it’s shot to look like a piece of amateur footage, as though the idea had been spontaneous and captured by chance by another stage hand with a camera.

YouTube then has become an odd mixture of things. The site might have started with amateurs in mind but even as professionals have taken it over, some amateurs have managed to join them — and many professionals are trying to look like amateurs.

With more than two billion videos served every day — almost double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined — standing out on YouTube so that your clips win attention, go viral and perhaps even graduate to a meme is never going to be easy. There are a few ingredients though that every YouTube clip needs to have if it’s to beat out the music videos and the lolcats to win views and build an audience.

The most important, of course, is interesting content. That might appear obvious but it’s actually rarer and more difficult to create than it sounds. More than 24 hours of video content is added to YouTube every minute, so information that’s entertaining enough to be worth watching and original enough that audiences haven’t seen it before is actually relatively rare. When it does appear on the site, it quickly snowballs, building up large numbers of views.

Like the secret ingredient of a Hollywood blockbuster, there’s no failsafe formula that makes up good video content. On some clips, it might be a free practical instruction (such as this video demonstrating how to draw a skull); on others, it might be an original use of graphics in post-production (such as in this clip by a professional director which has generated almost half a million views). The good news though is that the quality of content can override production values. Although many of the most popular channels on YouTube are run by professionals — such as Popstar Magazine’s channel, with its exclusive interviews with teenage heartthrobs — YouTube is famous for the home-made appearance of its videos. That means that Geriatric1927, an 82-year-old widower from England, has been able to build up more than 53,000 subscribers and an incredible total of almost 8.4 million views just by sitting in front of a camera and reminiscing about his past. There’s no fancy editing, no graphics and no attempt to bring in friends to shoot the breeze or play with props. It’s simply the ability of unusual information and good stories to attract an audience.

Everyone Loves the Underdog

Part of the appeal of Geriatric1927 is that he’s not supposed to win, any more than Susan Boyle was supposed to have a nice voice. YouTube’s homemade quality has made it the place where the underdog can make an appearance and win the mass support necessary to battle against the big boys. When the production looks enthusiastic rather than professional and the talent genuine rather than manufactured, audiences can feel that they can put one over on industry by pushing forward their own champion. When the champion succeeds, they get to feel that they spotted them first. Their champion’s success is their success too.

The biggest recent beneficiary of the desire of YouTube’s audiences to discover and promote a potential winner is Justin Bieber. After being discovered on the site by music marketer Scooter Braun, Bieber was brought to Atlanta, Georgia to record demo tapes. At that point, the music company would have traditionally taken over the promotion process. But Braun kept Bieber on YouTube, continuing to upload videos.

“I wanted to build him up more on YouTube first,” he told The New York Times. “We supplied more content. I said: ‘Justin, sing like there’s no one in the room. But let’s not use expensive cameras.’ We’ll give it to kids, let them do the work, so that they feel like it’s theirs.”

That was a bit of smart marketing that combined the professional quality content of Bieber’s teen appeal with the underdog championing that’s unique to YouTube.

Show Don’t Tell

YouTube-manufactured Justin Biebers are relatively unusual, and not everyone can or wants to be a teenage sensation. For businesses, YouTube is more likely to be used as another way of distributing useful information that supplements the content on a blog. That content is often didactic. It teaches viewers something that they didn’t know previously, paying them for their attention with valuable knowledge.

When broadcasters do that on YouTube, the principle for success is the same as that in most storytelling: to show, not tell. TigerDirect, for example, is an electronics store which attempts to build a customer base by teaching audiences about the benefits and features of the products they sell. Its TigerDirectTV channel on YouTube contains a series of videos that discusses cameras, gadgets and computer equipment. Most of the clips are shot in a studio, with the presenter at a desk holding the item he’s discussing. But the channel isn’t afraid to get out of the room and take the camera to the great outdoors. In a clip discussing the difference between G and N wireless routers, for example, three presenters set up two routers on a long empty road and continued driving until the signal from each faded. The presenters could have said that G routers are good for 20 yards, N routers for much further but by demonstrating the difference physically, they created much better — and more memorable — content.

Although success on YouTube can come from an amateur appearance, professionalism can work too.

It would be great to say then that you can either go for shaky camera work and win the support of the underdog or bring in a crew and create a professional-looking show. As long as the content is interesting and entertaining enough, you’ll be a success. But it’s not that easy because there’s another element that’s vital for success on YouTube whatever your approach.

You have to do the marketing.

Put up a video on YouTube and you’re not going to get views unless people know you’re there. That means adding comments – intelligent, helpful comments – at the bottom of related clips. It means talking about the clip on your own website. And it means continuing to add new content on a regular basis so that you maintain your audience and don’t lose viewers just as your popularity starts to build. All of that takes time and effort — which is why it’s so much easier to film your cat getting stuck at the top of the curtains.

Look back at the great advances of the Internet in the last few years and two things stand out: user-generated content; and social networking.

Both of those have turned out to be hugely successful, giving sites like YouTube and Facebook valuations that can make an accountant’s mind boggle.

So what would happen if you combined both systems into one website? And added some TV-style advertising product placement?

And tossed in a touch of Jackass and a smidge of Web-friendly nudity?

Wanted: An Online Borat
That’s exactly what Daron Niemerow, 29, a producer and director who has created commercials and interactive media products for Sun, Kodak and Intel among others, and childhood friend Ben Bacal, have done. The result is DareJunkies.com, a video site that lays down challenges and invites users to submit clips and vote on the best, awarding a cash prize to the winning clip.

“Dare Junkies was inspired by old-school and new waves of innovative artists who have captured massive attention and garnered huge financial success and notoriety such as the mega-hit brands Borat, Jackass, Larry David, Andy Kaufman, Punk’d, SNL, and Mad TV,” Daron explained to us by email. “We know that this caliber of work already exists and we believe user-generated videos are improving and should be further rewarded.”

Still from DareJunkies’ “My Sexy Dog Lick.”

Whether the sort of films posted on DareJunkies will mark an improvement in the quality of user-generated video — or a degeneration — is debatable though. At the moment, the site shows half a dozen sample clips created partly by users and partly by the site’s internal production team. These include footage of pole-dancers doing their thing on the New York subway, a couple making out in a public library and a bikini-wearing young woman covering herself in peanut butter in a park so that dogs can lick it off.

The videos’ production values are high (the moral values not so much) and when the site originally launched in December 2006, it attracted 357,000 users on its first day, making the news on Fox 11, E! Entertainment, and the LA Times Business Section.

Too Many Users Crash the Site on the First Day
In fact, the site was so popular that Daron had to take it down to completely overhaul the platform and prepare it to cope with the unexpectedly large number of users:

“[D]ue to the high impact of users voting and participating we unfortunately couldn’t scale the platform quick enough to accommodate all the participation. As a result, we brought the website down so we can rebuild the platform and technology so users will now have more functionality and an accelerated (not slow) user experience.”

Daron Niemerow

With a team of five programmers building a more stable infrastructure, the site is due to relaunch at the end of January 2008. In addition to the sample videos of pretty girls wearing very little, it will then have 30 dare categories to choose from. Extreme sports, for example, is one category and lets people show their most spectacular tricks. Users can pick a category, dare a friend or themselves, upload the clip, vote and win a $10,000 prize.

“The video doesn’t even have to be something they produced exclusively for the website,” says Daron. “ Users might find they have old video moments that fit our categories, we accept those too.”

That might sound like DareJunkies could become, at least in part, a little like America’s Funniest Home Movies… only with more bruises and less clothes. But it does have a clever twist. The site is hoping to generate revenue by challenging users to create videos that feature product placement. As Daron explained:

“Sponsors will give us a product, for example, Axe deodorant. We will then tell our users to submit their sexiest kiss dare video for Valentine’s day using the body spray to attract a kiss.”

The addition of product placement to Internet-based videos isn’t new, of course. Lonelygirl15 was the first online channel to place ads when it showed characters eating Hershey’s Icebreaker’s Sours Gum in one episode of the YouTube phenomenon. But that was a scripted show, allowing sponsors to control how its product was used and shown. A site that dares members of the public to make use of a product is likely to pose all sorts of challenges both to the sponsor and to the site. Although Daron notes that:

“[a]ll our videos are pre-screened before they get posted on the site. We don’t encourage any dangerous, harmful, explicit nudity or unlawful activity”

It might take just one letter from the lawyer of a deodorant-clutching, broken-legged, teenage skateboarder to scare off other sponsors. Unless, of course, the sales caused by the publicity more than make up for the costs. In practice, much is likely to depend on the sort of dares associated with the product. DareJunkies rather than users post the sponsored dares, giving both the sponsor and the site at least some degree of control.

Whether product placement turns out to be the solution that allows user-generated video and crowd-sourced voting to generate a profit for distributors remains to be seen. For Daron though, what isn’t in doubt is the direction of Web 2.0.

“I believe the TV revolution of the early twentieth century was born based on game shows which ignited audience participation. The Internet will become a user-participated platform where prizes and cash will be the draw.”

[tags] darejunkies [/tags]