YouTube Stars!

You know him, you love him, he's KwaiChi! One of the Good Guys in the YouTube community, Kwai has been making videos on YouTube almost from Day One. Always looking to do something positive, Kwai was a leader in the Anti-Racism Collaboration and raised money for the Red Nose Day charity. I won the charity auction for the T-Shirt Kwai has on in this video! Lately, Kwai is doing product reviews, like this recent excellent vid about the Nintendo Wii Fit. He's busy, but he found the time to write this Guest Post for us, about Rollercoasters!

But first, The News!

There's a lot going on at YouTube lately!

Fred, played by teen Lucas Cruikshank of Nebraska, was the first YouTube Channel to have One Million Subscribers! I remember a few years back when Lucas contacted me to ask if I would check out his JKL Productions channel, where Fred was created. Things have certainly gone well for Lucas and we at YouTubeStars congratulate him on his huge success!

YouTube continues to partner with large corporations to help pay the huge storage and bandwidth bills it incurs daily. There is now a Shows link at the top of every page, which brings you to a part of YouTube that looks a lot like Hulu! Go check out an old episode of "I Dream of Jeannie" or "Charlie's Angels!" Read more at this Wired blog post.

Just when you thought everyone in the world has visited YouTube, new people pour in again. Already one of the most watched YouTube clips of all time, the recently posted clips (there are many duplicates) of 47-year-old UK singer Susan Boyle auditioning for "Britain's Got Talent" went viral in just days. If you haven't seen this clip, click here to see what everyone is talking about!


And now, KwaiChi's post on Rollercoasters!


THE BEST ROLLERCOASTER IN THE WORLD

Expedition GeForce in Holiday Park, Germany has been voted the best rollercoaster by readers of coastergrotto.com. Oddly I have been on this ride loads of times and although it's fun, it's not a massive thrill in my humble opinion. Here are some geeky statistics:

Type: Steel Junior Hyper
Status: Operating since 2001
Designer: Intamin
Features: Elevator Cable Lift, Terrain
Height: 188 feet
Max Drop: 180 feet
Max Speed: 74 mph
Length: 4003 feet

The video below is a front rider point if view taken by Dutch theme park enthusiast turolaaf:




THE LARGEST DROP ON A ROLLERCOASTER IN THE WORLD

The largest drop in the world weighing in with a 418ft drop and 2nd fastest ride in the world is simply jaw dropping (that's if your jaw could drop on this ride). Once the top of all the ratings, reviews and record books, the Kingda Ka is a hard one to beat when it comes to the ultimate rollercoaster thrill. Here are the geeky stats:

Current Name: Kingda Ka
Location: Six Flags Great Adventure
Type: Steel Rocket
Status: Operating since 2005
Designer: Intamin
Features: Dual Station, Hydraulic Launch, Vertical
Height: 456 feet
Max Drop: 418 feet
Max Speed: 128 mph
Length: 3118 feet
Comments: This ride goes from 0-128 mph in just 3.5 seconds and lasts just 30 seconds!

Locals of the theme park Frank & Clarilyn posted this and many other rides on their Six Flags Great Adventure channel sixflgs15:




THE FASTEST ROLLERCOASTER IN THE WORLD

This year launches a brand new ride which will also be the fastest in the world boosting passengers at an astonishing 135mph! Based at Nürburgring, home of the famous public racetrack, the ring°racer will be their first theme park style ride to compliment the other attractions available on or around the race track. Even the ride cars will be shaped like race cars! Here are the stats:

Type: Steel Air-thrust
Status: Under Construction opening 2009
Designer: S&S Power
Features: Air Powered Launch
Height:
Max Drop: 0 feet
Max Speed: 135 mph
Length: 3960 feet
Trivia: This ride goes from 0 - 134.8 mph in just 2.5 seconds.

As no one has yet had a ride on this yet, there is a youtuber who goes under the name CoasterAnimation who mocks up the conceptial animations for some of the theme park ride designers.





THE LONGEST ROLLERCOASTER IN THE WORLD

The longest ride in the world by a long distance is the Steel Dragon 2000 located in Nagashima Spa Land, Japan. Here are the stats:

Type: Steel Giga
Status: Operating since 2000
Designer: Morgan
Features: 2 Tunnels
Height: 318 feet
Max Drop: 307 feet
Max Speed: 95 mph
Length: 8133 feet
Trivia: The ride was closed between 8/23/2003 and 9/2/2006 as a result on an accident.

Theme park reviewers Robb & Elissa Alvey have been roller coaster and theme park "enthusiasts" for over 20 years. They have traveled the globe to experience the thrills of over 1,500 different roller coasters.

Together they have spent 16 years working in the theme park industry and they have been featured on theme park documentaries for Discovery Channel. They posted this front cart point of view video of the Stteel Dragon 2000 on their robbalvey youtube site.





My thanks go to all the brave people who had the guts to hold on to their cameras, hold them steady and share the best rides with us all. I gave it a go a couple of years back and here is my favourite ride in the world located in Alton Towers, England. It's not the tallest, it's not the fastest and it's not the longest, but it is Oblivion!

Labels: Boyle, fred, kwaichi, News, rollercoasters, Susan, Talent

posted by KennyCrane at 4/21/2009 12:41:00 AM 0 Comments

First, the good news. YouTube has expanded their Partner Program. This means that more people will be able to make money from ads that will run in and next to their videos. YouTube ran a pilot Partner Program earlier this year and asked about 100 people if they wanted to be in it. Now, they are ready to admit many more. The rules state that you may be made a partner if you have lots of subscribers and video views and you adhere to YouTube's Terms of Use. How much money can you make? No one is talking because Partners have to sign a non-disclosure document. It has been rumored that partners are paid around 10 cents per thousand views - that's $100 for a million views. If you want to find out for sure what the pay rate is, apply for the Partner Program. If you're chosen to join, you'll find out about the earning potential. Good Luck!

To learn more about the partners program, watch the following video from YouTube's own channel. Also, read this article and have a look at YouTube's blog entry on the partner expansion.




The bad news is that there are signs that YouTube is still unable to administer its system fairly. There are continued reports of people having their accounts suspended for little to no reason, while others who are banned multiple times for good cause are still able to keep coming back. People are still able to artificially inflate their video views, and the thumbs up/down system has been abused. Mikma, a YouTuber whose trademark catchphrase comment is "Mikma was here" has recently had all of his comments deleted by YouTube. All this has many people wondering if YouTube can fairly administer their Partner Program. Time will tell, we'll have to wait and see how it goes. Here are two videos, from Tom (tlg847) - a member of the new YouTube Council, and long time YouTubeStar Paperlilies, about the Mikma mess.







More bad news, from the American heartland. There was a mall shooting recently in Omaha Nebraska. YouTuber FairyPixie lives there. She made a heartfelt video about the tragedy. She made the point that kindness is contagious and we should be nice to each other. Maybe a kind act could be just the thing to keep someone on the edge from doing something terrible. Watch the video, FairyPixie expresses this thought much better than I can!

Labels: fairypixie, mall, News, omaha, Paperlilies, partner, program, tlg847

posted by KennyCrane at 12/12/2007 02:31:00 AM 1 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

Here are a few videos that related by the tag News or New. Either they provide news or showcase a new face on YouTube. So here's some of what's new on YouTube:

Pure Madness

Here's some interesting NEWS! TheHill88, from Australia, is visiting Boh3m3, in Alabama. Caitlin and Ben sure look happy! Is it just two YouTube friends meeting up for a friendly visit? Watch all the way to the end and you'll have your answer!


If you can't see the video above, watch it on YouTube.


Introduction

I watched some of those San Fran Gathering videos and saw an interesting New face that I did not recognize. After a little research, I found out that the attractive woman I saw makes videos under the name of theslyestfox. Callianne is 23 and lives in Canada. She has been making videos since she was 14. Watch her intro video and then check out the rest of her work!


If you can't see the video above, watch it on YouTube.

Vlog 2
The always charming and entertaining Angharad John from Wales, a.k.a. Darahgna, is now doing video blogs under the screen name of AngylionAngharad. This is the second one she did (first one is here), and it contains the News that she is taking a one month hiatus from the internet. All of her fans are missing her already!


If you can't see the video above, watch it on YouTube.

Kenny The Snowman ... Down-under
Speaking of Angharad's fans, here is the first video from IgnatiusJones, a 49 year old New Zealander. He tries to copy Angharad by making his own snowman named Kenny (for me!). But the weather isn't quite the same down there as it is up in the Northern hemisphere. Watch what happens! Welcome to YouTube, my New friend. =D


If you can't see the video above, watch it on YouTube.

Labels: angharad, Boh3m3, Darahgna, faces, IgnatiusJones, Kenny, New, News, snowman, TheHill88, theslyestfox

posted by KennyCrane at 3/05/2007 05:19:00 AM 2 Comments