Everything I know I learned from YouTube

It's time to reflect on marketing, the meaning of life and YouTube. I learned a lot from online video, not so much from watching online video but more so from watching what people watch online.

Over the past couple of months I've kept a spreadsheet of the daily top 100 YouTube videos. Crunching the numbers reveals an incredible number of consistencies and human habits, to the extent that if an alien were to only watch the top 100 videos on YouTube to understand our species, they could convincingly argue that our only interests are: pain, breasts, paranoia, soccer, cartoons, soap operas, Obama.

These interests are cross-cultural, although some are more popular in certain languages than others, which is important because a popular video in one language has a halo-effect that increases the popularity of other videos in that language. Soap operas are most popular in Mandarin and Arabic (19% of the top 100 videos today are clips from Arabic soap operas) and the Taiwanese soap opera Fated to Love You (命中注定我愛你) can take up 35% of the top videos on the Monday following a new episode. Cartoons, however, are only in Japanese, which is consistently the second most popular language after English, possibly because videos with breasts are always in English or Japanese. Political videos are usually in English, Mandarin or Italian. Soccer comes in every language, as does pain.

I shouldn't've been so surprised, but I hadn't anticipated to what extent people like to see other people get hurt. From the Japanese newscaster that broke his neck jumping into a rice paddie on live television, to the Cuban athlete that kicked a ref in the face at the Olympics (6 of today's top 100, four days after it happened), pain is popular. Almost getting hurt is equally popular (see Kobe's jumping over the car commercial) and learning about what could hurt you is immensely popular no matter how unlikely (see 9-11 conspiracy videos and those cellphone popping popcorn videos (EVERYBODY PANIC!)).

The cellphone popcorn videos worked well because they remind me about how my cousin's wife read an article that said a doctor read an article that said cellphone's give you brain cancer--the videos fit into an established cultural meme and a basic emotional instinct: fear. Not that all marketing campaigns have to do this, but trying to make people do things and think things they don't already do and think is very difficult. Creative takes on established norms work best, online and off.

Bell recently tried to launch a real-world viral marketing campaign in cities across Canada for the Samsung Instinct phone by posting billboards and bus ads with nothing but a blue mark and the letters "er". I'm sure some marketing genius sold Bell on the idea that everyone in Canada would be chatting at the water cooler about what the "er er er" on the side of the bus might mean. But why would they?

Besides, every morning, on my way to work, I ride a full bus past a heroin shooting gallery, a pack of crack dealers in an alley and a superbuff woman voluntarily directing traffic wearing pink sneakers and turquoise shortshorts. A billboard with an "er" on it doesn't even register.

I don't want to suggest there's a magic formula to viral marketing but I do think the Bell campaign failed because it didn't play into a human emotional need. Online video sites allow us to easily track what people want to watch, and with so much media available that does fit viewer interests, there's failure and mediocrity in store for marketers that ignore what people want to see.

And what do they want to see? Well, if we combined all of the most popular videos from the last 8 months, theoretically, I think the most popular video of all time would be Japanese-language news footage of four women wearing bikinis, driving golf carts, trying to run over Ronaldinho while shouting, "Yes, we can!"

That's it for me here at Strutta. It's been great. Thanks to the Strutta crew and everyone I've met while working here!