POPTUB is a channel on YouTube which produces which produces a daily show of hot videos, produces interviews and goes behind the scenes on many other productions. POPTUB is professionally produced, sponsored by Pepsi. I personally don’t see the attraction of POPTUB, but I find it interesting that old media are so keen on them.
Highlighting popular videos isn’t even that new of an idea. Forums and several vodcasts, like Best of YouTube and Internet Superstar, have been that great an idea. So what makes POPTUB so different and so popular with YouTube superstars like HotforWords, Obama Girl and Nalts? Frankly, I do not know. HotforWords even covered them on her show, and claimed that it was not a ‘paid advertisement’. The majority of her viewers did not find POPTUB as interesting as HotforWords did, obviously, as they only gave the video a rating of 2.5/5.
Old media clearly like POPTUB too. How many other YouTube channels could get behind the scenes with Fall Out Boy or the cast of High School Musical? According to Cnet, ‘Poptub has promised advertisers 3 million views of Poptub by the end of the year’. Perhaps overly ambitious aims like that are the reason why!
YouTube viewers don’t seem to be too eager to watch POPTUB. Out of their 149 videos, the most popular is an interview with HotforWords which attracted 214,000 views (but only a 2.5 rating), followed by three with 40,000-60,000 views. The rest have less than 20,000 views; the majority have less than 10,000.
Thousands of views may seem impressive, but considering the amount of hype POPTUB has gathered, high profile interviewees and a presumably professional production, that’s quite low. That’s actually very low when one considers the world’s most annoying 6 year old can gain 800,000 views in less than three days!
Apparently, Google are responsible for POPTUB.
I wonder what’s going on with POPTUB, and how they get high profile members of the YouTube community to support them. It strikes me that POPTUB does not understand what the YouTube community wants, which would be extremely bad if Google were reponsible for it, as that would mean they do not even know their own userbase. For example, POPTUB clearly misjudged the viewers of shows like HotforWords, who clearly didn’t appreciate their show simply plugging another.
POPTUB, despite its backing, will fail. Why? YouTube users don’t like it. I’d dare say they prefer amateur shows and they dislike TNCs producing shows, and would rather watch the likes of Revision3.
Rest assured I was smitten for Maria Sansone well before she was on PopTub and was writing about PopTub before I knew it was Google backed.
I think the reason it’s been well received is because rather than focus on television clips (like WebJunk) it’s paid attention to the amateurs and even the little guys with no views. So that makes them welcome from my perspective.
Another motivation I’ve had to promote them is that I see the show’s format as a way to grow the YouTube community- it makes it easy to catch up on what’s hot and involve yourself more deeply. So my hope (and desire to promote the show) is that it can bridge the noobs into YouTube, and potentially get the amateurs more widely seen.
I’m very pro amateur, and even though the show is somewhat professional, the spirit of it isn’t “Big TV moved to web.” Most of the people involved in the show (as I discovered last week when I begged to co-host) are web junkies like you and me.