It shouldn’t come as any surprise, but the top TV ad of the year, according to Nielsen, happens to be the same ad as YouTube’s top ad of the year. That would, of course, be Volkswagen’s The Force, featuring the little kid dressed ad Darth Vader. In fact, that video even made YouTube’s top ten videos period.
1. VW – The Force
2. T-Mobile – Royal Wedding
3. Chrysler – Imported From Detroit
4. DC Shoes – Ken Block’s Gymkhana Four: The Hollywood Megamercial
5. SmartWater – Jennifer Aniston goes viral
6. Team Hot Wheels – The Yellow Driver’s World Record Jump
7. Old Spice – Scent Vacation
8. Apple – Introducing Siri on iPhone 4S
9. Samsung – Unleash Your Fingers
10. Adidas D Rose: adiZero Rose 2 — The Bull
The lesson for advertisers appears to be: use Star Wars for inspiration in your campaigns. Of course, you’ll want to do that without getting sued.
In what could provide the most enjoyable year-in-review experience around, YouTube has just announced their Rewind 2011, a trip down memory lane, feature everyone’s favorite (and possibly least-favorite) videos of the year.
You could say that it was a pretty big year for YouTube. In a blog post, they announced over 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000 for effect) playbacks on the site as a whole. That’s around 140 playbacks for every person on planet Earth.
“To compile these lists, we looked at global view counts of popular videos uploaded throughout this year, and, in some instances, we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video.”
Here’s what they came up with, the top ten videos of the year (in order)
1. Rebecca Black- “Friday”
2. Ultimate Dog Tease
3. Jack Sparrow (feat. Michael Bolton)
4. Talking Twin Babies (pt. 2)
5. Nyan Cat
6. Look At Me Now – Cover by @KarminMusic
7. The Creep (feat. Nicki Minaj & John Waters) (Hulu embed)
8. Maria Aragon – Born This Way Cover
9. The Force – Volkswagen Commercial
10. Cat mom hugs her baby kitten
Here’s their list for most viewed videos from major record labels:
Jennifer Lopez – On The Floor ft. Pitbull
LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem ft. Lauren Bennett, GoonRock
Bruno Mars – The Lazy Song [Official Video]
Nicki Minaj – Super Bass
Pitbull – Give Me Everything ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, Nayer
Pitbull – Rain Over Me ft. Marc Anthony
Jessie J – Price Tag ft. B.o.B.
LMFAO – Sexy and I Know It
Katy Perry – E.T. ft. Kanye West
Katy Perry – Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)
Over at the blog post, YouTube also links to playlists where you can find the most popular videos in specific categories like sports, travel, food, science and fashion.
For instance, here’s the most watched video of the year in the “sports” category:
The YouTube Rewind page features more year-end lists like “fastest rising search terms” organized by month, and a place to vote for the best videos of the year.
What was your favorite YouTube video of 2011? Let us know in the comments.
Google has put out a new Webmaster Help video, featuring (as usual) head of web spam Matt Cutts. This time, Cutts is answering his own question, rather than a user-submitted question.
The question is: What is the ideal keyword density: 0.7%, 75, or 77%? Or is it some other number?
“A lot of people there’s some one recipe, and you can just follow that like baking cookies, and if you follow it to the letter, you’ll rank number one,” he says.
Shockingly, that’s not the case.
There’s no set percentage for keyword density, that will help you rank, according to Cutts. “That’s not the way that search engine rankings work,” he says.
“The way that modern search engines, or at least Google, are built,” says Cutts with a slight chuckle, “is that the first time you mention a word, you know, ‘Hey, that’s pretty interesting. It’s about that word.’ The next time you mention that word, ‘oh, OK. It’s still about that word.’ And once you start to mention it a whole lot, it really doesn’t help that much more. There’s diminishing returns. It’s just an incremental benefit, but it’s really not that large.”
“And what you’ll find is that if you continue to repeat stuff over and over again, then you’re getting in danger of keyword stuffing, or gibberish and those kinds of things.”
“So, the first one or two times you mention a word – that might help with your ranking. Absolutely. But just because you can say it seven or eight times, that doesn’t mean that it will necessarily help your rankings.”
“The way to think about it is this,” Cutts wraps up. “Think about the keywords that you’d like to have in your copy. Make sure your copy is long enough that you can work those keywords into your copy in a natural way and not an artificial way. And my recommendation is to either read it aloud or read it to someone else or have someone else read it, and sort of say, ‘Do you spot anything that’s artificial or stilted or that doesn’t quite read right?’ And if you can read through the copy, and have it read naturally where a person isn’t going to be annoyed by it, then you’re doing relatively well.”
Another tip for surviving Panda? Don’t annoy readers.
The most useful appliances and electronics are those that can consolidate multiple uses. Take XBox, where you can watch Netflix and play video games. Toaster ovens can cook your dinner or heat up yesterday’s leftovers. Some responsibilities, though, may seem impossible to combine but this is a funny world and ’tis the season of miracles.
Take YouTube user ThatSpecialGuy. He (presumably) likes to play video games but he also has a pet Bearded Dragon Lizard that he must attend to, as well. Normally, these two responsibilities might not overlap if not outright conflict with each other, but take a look at what wonder the marriage of technology and nature has produced:
Indeed, you just watched a Bearded Dragon Lizard play a pretty deft game of Ant Crusher on an HTC smartphone (judging by the looks of it in the video). It’s really hard to grasp how someone finds out that their lizard will play video games on a touchscreen phone, but I’m glad they did. It’s also a pretty fascinating testimonial of what kind of force must be behind the projection of the lizard’s tongue. I can’t get my smartphone to do respond at all when I’ve tried to press buttons with my knuckles or elbows (don’t ask) so that lizard must be punching that screen with some serious power.
Personally, I’ve never played Ant Crusher so I have no idea how difficult this game really is but now that I’ve seen a reptile do a knock-out job of playing it I’m a little hesitant to find out if I can do any better? What would that mean if I didn’t reach the watermark that the Lizard has set with that awesome score? These are questions I don’t really want to ask myself.
It’s Galaxy Nexus day, and people have been lining up to purchase the new device. I came across a promotional video in Google’s YouTube uploads promoting Google Hangouts on the device, using a classic Queen song:
Google has sure been on a Queen kick lately. A few months ago, they had an entertaining Freddie Mercury doodle for their logo in honor of the late singer. Here’s their video from that:
Here is some more of today’s coverage on the Galaxy Nexus:
A viral video is one that becomes popular though the process of Internet sharing, via social media, sharing sites, or good ‘ole email. Everyday we highlight some of the best that are currently viral and some that are trending that way.
Today we have Bill O’Reilly being a decent human being, Will Ferrell talking about beer, and virgins kissing. Enjoy.
OK, Eric Schmidt and James Cameron are in the same video, talking to each other for quite a while. The flying robots are in a different (and much shorter) video. Pretty interesting stuff.
Today’s video round-up looks at AndroidLand in Australia, LinkedIn company status updates, lion hugs, and last year’s Santa tracking (ahead of this year’s of course).
Today’s video round-up includes some Galaxy Nexus speed tests, Bing decisions that shaped 2011 (via Google’s YouTube), and an instant hit Lady Gaga video. And some great shark footage.
Today’s video round-up features a couple pieces of iPhone-related humor, Method Man rapping about Sour Patch Kids, and an intervie with Twitter Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain.
Today’s video round-up features some PageRank eduction from Matt Cutts, NMA’s take on the Ndamukong Suh situation, Stephen Hawking dicussing YouTube Space Lab, and much more.
Google Webmaster Central tweeted out a new Matt Cutts video today, discussing the Panda update and scrapers. The specific question addressed is: “I understand that the recent farmer update (Panda) gives a penalty for poor content. Given the penalty scrapers have been outranking original sites. Should webmasters spend time in fighting scrapers directly or work on the poor content?”
“My advice would be to really concentrate on the quality of your own site,” says Cutts. “It is the case that sometimes scrapers can be returned in Google search results, despite our best efforts. And it is the case that sometimes you see scrapers more or less often, but it’s also the case that Google has been working on trying to find and fix the problems related to scrapers.”
“We’ve got engineers working on that,” he says. “They’re going to keep working on that. We’ve actually got some good stuff in the pipeline that I’m pretty excited about.”
Now, it’s worth noting that the actual upload date of this video is August 8, though it was not released as a new video until today.
“So we’ll keep working on the scraper side of things,” Cutts says in the video. “My advice for people who may have been affected by the ‘Farmer’ or the ‘Panda’ update is to concentrate primarily more on the quality side – the content side – thinking about how can you either improve the quality of the content if there’s some part of your site that’s got especially low quality content or stuff that was really not all that useful, then it might make sense to not have that content on your site. Things along those lines.”
“So if you think about it, the fundamental problem, if you’re affected by this particular algorithm update, is that Google is thinking that your site is not providing as high quality content as some other sites,” he says. “So the best thing to do is to concentrate on the root of the issue. To concentrate on trying to make sure that you have the highest quality content so that Google sees that and can assess that, and then you don’t have to worry nearly as much about the scrapers, because you’re doing much better.”
Today’s video round-up includes Google’s own look at the evolution of search (as well as where search is headed), some pee-controlled games in London, and Internet censorship in Turkey (among other things).
Google is no stranger to putting out videos about search. They put out webmaster help videos all the time, but earlier this year, we got a rare look into the inside of how Google shapes its algorithms. There wasn’t a lot of groundbreaking information in that, but it was interesting to see nonetheless.
Here’s that video:
Similarly, while not a lot of new information is provided, Google has released a new video about the “evolution of search,” which is kind of a documentary-style six minute look at how Google has evolved over the years, as told by Googler like Amit Singhal, Marissa Mayer, Ben Gomes, Jack Menzel, and Johanna Wright.
Here’s the new one:
Google has also released an accompanying timeline:
Click to enlarge
The last part of the video is about “the future of search,” and that’s always a hot topic, given that Google controls such a dominant portion of the search market. Webmasters would do well to listen to what Google has to say about where search is going.
“The truth is that our users need much more complex answers,” says Singhal in the video. “My dream has always been to build the Star Trek computer, and in my ideal world, I would be able to walk up to a computer, and say, ‘Hey, what is the best time for me to sow seeds in India, given that monsoon was early this year?’ And once we can answer that question (which we don’t today), people will be looking for answers to even more complex questions. These are all genuine information needs. Genuine questions that if we – Google – can answer, our users will become more knowledgable and they will be more satisfied in their quest for knowledge.”
“Our goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek,” says Gomes on the Inside Search blog. “That means you don’t generally need to know about the latest search feature in order to take advantage of it— simply type into the box as usual and find the answers you’re looking for.”
Perhaps not a lot of takeaways you can go out and apply to your site right now, but it does give you an idea of the kind of search engine Google is striving to build, and the better you can solve real problems with your content, the more Google is bound to like that content. You can go back and look at Google’s list of questions for assessing quality, and get that much.
