On small blogs such as this, comments generally remain related to the blog post. A humorous video by Barely Political strengthened my view, though, that on social networking sites like YouTube, they often end up being completed unrelated to the topic of the video.

I hate YouTube comments. Find me one decent one. They are generally a series of curse words in an incoherent sentence, resembling ‘you suck’. If not that, they’ll just be about the number of views (‘how does a laughing baby get 79 mill views?’). On a blog, people would not go to the hassle of writing comments which have no meaning.

Otherwise, comments erupt into an irrelevant political debate, as they often did in the run-up to the 2008 American presidential elections. If not that, they will become racist. I admit on occasion I respond to ones I strongly disagree with, but only if my political views are antithetical to someone elses and only if the video is about the issue.

It’s too easy to write a meaningless sentence and then to submit it. The result is people post things without thinking their argument through or even proof-reading what they’ve written. If voting held a more important role on the site, completely useless and idiotic comments would never be have to be seen again. There’s another explanation, which is quite cynical but quite likely to be true: I suspect that many people leave pointless YouTube comments in a pathetic attempt to drive people to their profiles.

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.