YouTube Stars!

 
We would like to wish all of our readers a Happy Thanksgiving! If you're not from the United States, Thanksgiving is a holiday where we give thanks for the people and things that we have in our lives. We would like to thank YouTube for providing this free video sharing service, and all the viewers and videomakers for creating the YouTube community. Also, thanks to all the readers of YouTubeStars!

In this post, we'll see a Thanksgiving video from Olga, the juggling actress. We'll hear a song from Krista, the 13-year-old singer; and also another singing performance from Callianne and Kimberly.

But first, we would like to announce a new website for you to visit. A few weeks ago, we wrote about Oprah on YouTube. Several members of the community commented that with all these corporate channels on YouTube these days, it's not easy to find videos on the Most Viewed list that is made by "regular people."



In response to this problem, we created a "Most Viewed NonCorp Videos" list. This list is based on YouTube's Most Viewed videos list, but with the Corporate Channels filtered out. To keep the list of Corporations to filter up to date, we've put a "Flag this Channel as Corporate!" button to the right of each video. If you see a video in the list that you think is on a Corporate Channel, please click the "Flag this Channel as Corporate!" link to the right of that video. We'll review the channel and if we agree that it is Corporate, it's videos will be filtered out of the list in the future. Please check out our "Most Viewed NonCorp Videos list right now! If you see a Corporate Channel, be sure to Flag it. Thanks for helping us keep this list Corporate-Free!

And now... a word from our sponsor.   :)


Thursday is Thanksgiving. That means Friday is the start of the holiday shopping season. If you plan to do some online shopping at Amazon.com this year, please start your shopping from one of our Amazon.com links. You'll pay the exact same prices and we'll earn a little commission. To see some Amazon Black Friday Deals, please click here.





Olga was born in Russia but now lives in the United States. In this video, she gives thanks to her parents and to America. Olga is going to be in a national TV commercial very soon! She tells you about that also in this video.





Krista is only 13 but she already has quite a singing voice! She shines in this new video. She gets to act as well as sing. Krista made this video because she is competing in the YouTube Idol contest. She is also in the Webpops contest. Watch this video for info on the Webpops contest.





Callianne watched this singing video by Kimberly and decided to remix it. She added her own vocals - twice! Callianne sings low and high harmony along with Kim and the result is fantastic! Callianne is a member of the band "Beasts and Superbeasts" and you can buy their CD from the link in the description of this video. I bought a copy; it's great!

 

Labels: Amazon, Kimberleigh, KristaHeartzuz, olgakay, thanksgiving, theslyestfox

posted by KennyCrane at 11/21/2007 05:05:00 AM 0 Comments

In this post, we'll follow up on the Story about the Arizona High School teacher suspended after she appeared in a YouTube video. Click here for our original story on this video. We'll also talk about ads on YouTube. For a list of constantly updated YouTube News stories, click here.

Higley teacher on YouTube resigns

It was widely reported on Tuesday that Christina Mallon, the Humanities/English teacher and Cheerleading coach who was placed on paid administrative leave last month after appearing in a YouTube video, has resigned from the Higley Unified School District near Phoenix Arizona. Ms. Mallon was filmed by an unknown person as she performed a short cheerleading routine for her Humanities class. It has been said that the students asked to see the new routine that she was working on for "Spirit Week." Mallon can be seen briefly wiggling her butt and a student can be heard to say, "You go, girl!" in the YouTube video which has since been removed. Parts of the original video can be seen in the following two videos. The first is from a local channel 5 TV news story and the second is a remix of parts of the original with new music. The first video has over 36 thousand views and the second has almost 180 thousand views as of today.





The original video which caused all the controversy was removed on 10/14/2007, about a week after it was posted on the 21superman2169 channel. Here are the stats on the original video, as recorded by the Your Tube Stats service:

Date Views Comments
10/13/2007 133464 1093
10/12/2007 129294 1069
10/11/2007 121513 1016
10/10/2007 106068 931

Most of the over 1000 comments on the original video were sympathetic to Ms. Mallon. This is also true about the comments on the two videos above and on the news stories at the East Valley Tribune news website.

As far as I know, no one knows the identity of 21superman2169, the person who uploaded the original video to YouTube. The only information given on that profile is:
Age: 22
Country: United States

However, after some investigation, we believe that the person who created that YouTube account and profile is not 22, but may in fact be a minor who attends the Williams Field High School where Christina Mallon was teaching. We will not be revealing any further information about this person who we believe uploaded the video, because this person is a minor.


Ads on YouTube

YouTube now shows ads in the bottom area of some videos made by its Partners. So far, there has not been a huge backlash against the ads, as feared by some. It is possible that we will soon see "pre-roll" video ads, short (possibly 15 second) commercials that will be displayed before the actual content appears.

It was reported Wednesday that most YouTube viewers (63%) would not mind pre-roll ads as long as they are 15 seconds long, at most. It is further reported that 11% of YouTube viewers would be willing to pay an annual fee ($24.95 was mentioned) to watch content without any ads. Please click here for the complete report.

If we examine the figures given in this news report, we can answer two questions.

How many viewers does YouTube have?

YouTube has 50 million viewers.
(0.11 x V) x $25 = $137,000,000
(0.11 x V) = 5,480,000
V = 49,818,181 or about 50 million Viewers.

How much money does YouTube make from its Ads?

YouTube makes $6.75 per year on every viewer from ad clicks.
5,480,000 x R = $37,000,000
R = $6.75 average revenue per viewer per year.


I wish YouTubeStars.com could generate $6.75 a year in Google Ad clicks for each of our viewers! YouTube seems to be doing very well in their Google Adsense income. Of course they have huge expenses in servers and bandwidth to provide us all with this free service. We have been very fortunate, and may have become spoiled, with the level of advertising on the YouTube site. Expect to see more ads on YouTube in the future.

Labels: 21superman2169, ads, cheer, Google, News, teacher, YouTube

posted by KennyCrane at 11/14/2007 11:21:00 PM 2 Comments

I would like to tell you about two talented female videomakers. Normally, I'd embed some of their videos in this post. However, both ladies have decided to set their videos to "Embedding disabled by request." So, I'll just tell you about these entertaining women and give links to their videos on YouTube.

But first, The NEWS. There is not much movement this week in the top 50 of the Top 100 Weekly Chart. But there are some nice movers in the bottom 50. MarieDigby, LazyLionProductions and Mememolly all made nice moves on the 41-60 page. Wowhobbs, a World Of Warcraft channel, moved up 8 to the number 88 slot.

The once mighty Lonelygirl15 channel has been losing subscribers lately. According to the Subscriber History for lonelygirl15, we see that the channel has been losing subscribers since it peaked at 101,357 on 9/23/2007. Will current number 1, Smosh, fall from the top like Lonelygirl15, Brookers, FilthyWhore and Geriatric1927 all have? If we look at the number of subscribers they have versus number two, universalmusicgroup, it doesn't appear that they will leave the top spot any time soon.

Recently, we reported on the YouTube community's reaction to the fact that Oprah is on YouTube. Since then, there has been one more video of note on the Oprah "Hullabaloo" from popular videomaker Boh3m3. Please have a look at his thoughts on the matter, in his video titled An Apology / All the Hullabaloo (language warning!)


Artemisbell

A few weeks back, I was visiting with my young niece and nephew and something in the conversation caused me to begin singing the chorus of a song that I had not heard in years! I did not remember who sang the song, but I did know it contained the phrase "Love and Desire." So I searched for these words on YouTube and found a video that used the song as a backing track. The video portrayed a woman having a wonderful time dancing to the tune.

The woman in the video is Diana, an artist living in Arizona. She has made over 180 videos, almost all show her dancing to songs from the 60s through today. The first words on her profile sum up her attitude: "Have Fun...Do what you want to do...even if you're criticized." Diana certainly has fun making her dance videos! I also enjoyed her dancing to New Order's Blue Monday, Billy Idol's White Wedding and Madonna's 12 inch version of Burning Up. For more on Diana and her art, please visit her website.


Bicycleconnoisseur

I'm not sure how I first came across this very intelligent and charming young lady. I do know that the first video of hers that I saw was titled amerenglish. Lydia, living in the UK, discusses something that always interests me, the differences between British English and American English. I was struck by the level of presentation by someone of this age. Lydia is 15 and explains in her explanation video that she has been "technically labeled as gifted since I was about three." She is not saying this to boast, but it is clearly true as seen in this video!

Please also watch Lydia's commercial break, a cool faux advert for a Casio keyboard. And don't miss her question and answer video series, starting with Part I. Click here to see a list of all of Lydia's entertaining videos.

Labels: Artemisbell, artist, Bicycleconnoisseur, dance, intelligent, UK, women

posted by KennyCrane at 11/12/2007 04:36:00 AM 1 Comments

Oprah Winfrey, the popular American talk show host, now has a YouTube channel. She joined on November 1st and has almost 20,000 subscribers already. She has posted 18 videos, most are commercials for her show. Her most watched video is "Oprah's Message to YouTube!" with just under 1.1 million views. The video allows comments on approval and so far, only 22 comments made it through. Embedding is disabled and Video Responses seem to be disabled.

The YouTube community has reacted with ambivalence to Oprah's new channel. Some think it will bring new viewers for everyone's videos. But others object to Oprah's apparent "one-way conversation" - she seems to want to advertise to us without accepting feedback. It has also been lamented that the "golden age" of YouTube is over. With the corporate accounts racking up lots of viewers, its hard to get on the most discussed or most viewed lists without resorting to histrionics and sensationalism. YouTube seemed more like a commuity of videomakers before "partners" came on to advertise to us. But, all this was inevitable. YouTube was spending millions on the computer power and bandwidth necessary to provide this free service to the uploaders and viewers of the thousands of new videos posted weekly on the site.

How will the Oprah channel and the other corporate partners affect YouTube and the community of vloggers and viewers? Time will tell. So far, everyone seems to have their opinions on Oprah's debut. Out of the massive number of Oprah related videos, we've chosen a few to highlight here. They are all intelligent and insightful; please watch them and get into the discussion yourself!

Labels: backlash, Channel, community, Corporate, feedback, Oprah, partner, Winfrey, YouTube

posted by KennyCrane at 11/09/2007 05:17:00 AM 2 Comments

MadV is at it again! Sporting his trademark "V for Vendetta" mask and hoodie sweatshirt, MadV made this video last month, asking YouTubers to respond with a video about what inspires them. People were instructed to post these response videos on the 5th of November.

It's early in the morning of the 5th of November, and there are 78 responses already! About a year ago, MadV posted his famous "One World" video in which he asked for responders to write a message on their hand. There have been over 2200 responses so far! So I expect to see many more responses to this video. Watch MadV's video then go to YouTube and post your response!

Labels: inspiration, inspire, MadV, one, response, Vendetta, Video, world

posted by KennyCrane at 11/05/2007 02:44:00 AM 0 Comments

Last month, Google introduced Video Units to their Adsense program. People and companies with blogs and websites can embed YouTube videos in their sites of "relevant YouTube partner content." Read all about this new program in this post on Google's Adsense blog.

I decided to add a Video Unit to this post and see what videos Google plays. When setting up the Video Unit, you can choose categories of video to target to your site, select content from individual YouTube partners, or have video automatically targeted to your site content. I picked the third choice. Google is supposed to play videos that are relevant to the content of this blog. This is similar to what they do with their text and image Adsense ads. I was able to add several "hints" as to what kind of videos to play. I entered "music, singer, vlog, funny" as my hints. Those are the types of videos we often cover in this YouTubeStars blog.

I'll embed the Video Unit after this paragraph. First, I'd like to thank all my loyal readers who have been with us from the start, over a year and a half ago! I'd like to thank all the new readers who have dropped by along the way. I'd like to thank everyone who has subscribed to the RSS feed of this blog. Finally, thanks to everyone who checks out the action on our YouTube Top 100 chart - A Weekly Chart of the 100 Most Subscribed YouTube Members. We have been tracking statistics for over 400 members since September of 2006 - sign up and let us track your stats too!

Labels: 100, ads, adsense, chart, Google, RSS, top, weekly

posted by KennyCrane at 11/04/2007 01:18:00 AM 3 Comments

CelestialSam has submitted another guest post for YouTubeStars. She presents four videos from Piemcgee. Watch his videos and see if you agree that Piemcgee is a YouTubeStar!

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Do you like Johnny Cash? What about Josh Groban? Can you imagine the voices of those two talented gentleman combined into a powerful, well-tuned, enchantingly magnetic one? Well, look no further! No further that is, than piemcgee's YouTube channel. His covers and originals blew me away. I'm sure they'll leave you begging-if not crying-for more!


Check out his "Johnny Cash Folsom Prison Blues" cover. Make sure you're sitting down when you view this video. Andrew's voice will stupefy you!




Do you remember that one song from Donnie Darko? Yes, that song! You know the one: "...and I find it kind of funny; I find it kind of sad; the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.." Lucky for you, Andrew covers this song-with a twist! He sings in an octave lower in his "Mad World an Octave Lower Acoustic Cover".




Piemcgee's "In My Life - Acoustic Cover @ Vanguard University" hooked me on his channel instantaneously. Andrew's outstanding voice is accompanied by Nehemiah Rogers on violin. Think sweet, smooth and oh-so-deep.




The ultimate testimony of a great musician is the emotional intensity of his own original songs. "My Father-Original" is evidence of a greatness ready to bloom.




If you like what you hear, be sure to support him by buying his CD. Do so by visiting his music Myspace page .

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Please read Sam's previous guest posts:

Celestialsam Writes
Celestialsam Writes, again
Celestialsam Writes, Part3
Celestialsam Writes, Part4


Please click HERE for a list of YouTubeStars posts about CelestialSam.

Labels: Celestialsam, guest, piemcgee

posted by KennyCrane at 11/02/2007 02:33:00 AM 0 Comments