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Friday, June 23, 2006
Emmalina and Tasha: Culture in the Wild
I want to pick up on some of cultural dynamics stuff that’s been kicking around since the Moretti-fest, including Adam Roberts’ recent interest in the greatness of German music and some comments about the life cycle of blogs in Jonathan’s presentation of Alan Jacobs. I’ve just recently discovered YouTube, which, for those of you who don’t know, is an online environment where people can post and respond to video clips. It previewed starting in May 2005 and officially launched in December 2005. I found out about it because a number of classic cartoons have been posted there.
But that’s not what want to look at. I want to look at Emmalina, an 18 year old Australian who’s mostly been posting videos in which she presents herself. I have no particular reason for choosing Emmalina’s work over that of anyone else, no reason to believe she’s either typical or atypical of people who hang out at YouTube. I don’t know enough about the place to make such a judgment. Once I’d decided to look beyond those classic cartoons and to nose about in YouTube, however, I ran into Emmalina straight away.
Here’s how. I soon discovered that you could get a listing of videos ranked by the amount of discussion they elicited within YouTube. I looked at the list that specified how much commentary videos had received that day (there’s also a listing for the most recent week, month, and for all time) and one title caught my attention: “Did anyone need proof that I’m an attention whore?" That was Emmalina, dancing in her room to two different tunes, neither of which I recognized, at two different times, in two different outfits. The dancing was good, the videography artless, just a static camera. This clip had attracted upward of 250K viewings when I first saw it but now, a few days later, registers over 400K viewings. So far Emmalina has uploaded 30 videos and attracted almost 5000 subscribers. That is to say, 5000 people want to keep track of Emmalina’s videos. Just how that group is to be characterized - fan club, friends, the idly curious - is not at all obvious to me.
What’s interesting is simply that registered members of YouTube can subscribe to Emmalina’s videos - or anyone else’s videos, or even videos tagged with a specific identifier - and that the number of subscribers is public knowledge. Not only does Emmalina know that she has 5000 subscribers, so does everyone else. You can send comments to Emmalina, some of which show up online, and you can post a video clip in response to one of hers. This is an interactive environment and is set-up so online communities can form.
Finally, before getting into it, a note about numbers. I’ve been working on this piece for three or four days. The various numbers I’m posting have been changing during that interval. I’ve not attempted to gather all the numbers within, say, a given one-hour interval. Nothing I’m saying depends on that level of precision about the numbers. These numbers will continue to change. A month or two from now they will be significantly different.
Some Comparisons
Before looking a bit more at Emmalina’s “footprint” in YouTube, let’s digress and get a sense of what it means for a video to be viewed 400K times. The current all-time champ (the daily, weekly, and monthly numbers and rankings are different) is something called “Evolution of Dance," which was posted two months ago, with 25,323,199 views (as of this writing, 21 June 2006). In eight minutes one Jud Laipply, a comedian and motivational speaker, illustrates a bunch of popular dances from the last 50 years. The dancing isn’t better than Emmalina’s and the videography is similarly artless, a static camera. But Emmalina’s only got her style, while this is an act with a pile of styles. And Emmalina is presenting her dancing as part of her overall self-presentation while Laipply is presenting a professional act.
In second place we have the “Pokemon Theme Music Video", which I’ve not watched, at 12,643,589 viewings, half that for the top-rated video. This is followed by “Real Life Simpsons Intro" at 7,744,821 viewings, which I have watched. It’s what the title suggests, someone has covered the intro music for “The Simpson’s” with live action footage. Rather clever too.
Notice the numbers: 25,323,199; 12,643,589; and 7,744,821. These are far higher than Emmalina’s dancing, but they decline rapidly too. In fifth place we have something called “Hey clip" at 6,147,061 viewings. Uploaded by Tasha, who has almost 1400 subscribers, this one is worth watching - we’ll return to it later. It’s two young Israeli women lip-synching, air-guitaring, and dancing to a song I’ve never hear before. They’re having fun, and the editing is clever. In seventh place we’ve got something called “lion sleep tonight" at 5,858,969 viewings. This shows a stop-action hippopotamus and dog lip synching to the title song, which itself has an interesting a convoluted history.
So, the mid six-figure viewings number for Emmalina’s “attention” clip is not, in the scheme of things at YouTube, so very large. I have no idea of what the complete viewings curve looks like. Presumably there are lots of clips that have only been viewed 10 times or so.
Nor is there any implication, either from me or from YouTube, that number of viewings is a measure of quality; but it is certainly an indication of viewer interest. YouTube offers other ways of exploring videos. You can also see rankings according to how many comments clips have received (which is how I found Emmalina), according to the quality ratings they’ve received, according to how many links they’ve received, and one or two other ways.
Back to Emmalina
Emmalina’s profile page has her picture, some usage statistics, her self description, and various other things, which you can see for yourself. Here’s what shows up in her self description. First Emmalina offers two comments:
[1] No matter how much hatin’ I receive, I’m still going to be here posting my videos for the people who like them! You’re not going to scare me off, kids. ;)
[2] My videos are mine, not yours, thus not to be uploaded anywhere else, especially without my permission. I REALLY FUCKING MEAN THIS. I wouldn’t mention it if it hadn’t been a problem.
Now we have a bit of self description:
She’s Emmalina. 18. Australian. In love with a boy named Luke. I.T student. Geeky gamer. Vegan. Sensitive. A spoilt only child. Mood swinger extraordinaire. Loyal. Occasional seamstress. Internet addict. Gnome-sized.
I’m your preppy nerdy technology-lovin’ exhibitionist.
I videoblog, dance, make slideshows of photos I’ve taken and occasionally, you might catch something worth watching.
She also lists contact information, interests, and favorite books, movies, and music.
I’ve only looked at a half-dozen or so of the 30 video clips that she’s uploaded. There’s more dancing, but we’ve also got demonstrations of yoga poses, and mostly talk, about her life and interests and replies to comments and questions. She’s presenting herself.
Presumably that is what interests the thousands of people who have been watching her for the past two months. Just who those people are, I don’t know; I’ve not done much exploring. I’ve seen a number of comments of the “you’re awesome” variety, and negative comments as well. In one of her monologues she complains about creepy 60-year old men showing interest in an 18 year old girl that she finds inappropriate. In another monologue she notices a lock of hair straying across her forehead and informs us that she hasn’t had bangs since she was a child. And then there’s one called “For Nornna," posted because Nornna had asked her viewers to post a video of them watching one of Nornna’s videos. More dramatically, there’s “Meet Your Meat," a third-party clip about the lives of animals raised for slaughter - remember, Emmalina is a vegan. Finally, I note Emmalina’s outfits vary from one videoclip to the next.
And then we have video responses and commentaries. I’ll just mention three, “Yoga with Emmalina - DigiWax Yoga Master" and “Lazlydork Raps: Just Like Emmalina." The first shows man in a pose faked up by editing and a comment that it would be easy for someone to kick him the balls. The second, by one rickyste, is considerably more interesting. It shows a 30-something bearded man rapping about how his clips don’t get as much attention as Emmalina’s. Whatever the Emmalina phenomenon is about, this is a comment on it. Finally, “Emmalina Parady" (sic) opens with: “Emmalina’s gotten twenty-seven thousand hits in the last five minutes, and I’ve only gotten four all week.” Judging from the upload dates, this line was copped from Lazydork. And so it goes.
And then there is Emmalene, who is not the same person as Emmalina. Emmalene is an 18 year old Canadian who has uploaded 10 videos. Though Emmalene has been on YouTube longer than Emmalina, she’s only recently posted her first video. I know about her because links to some of her videos showed up on the same page as one of Emmalina’s videos. Presumably that is because Emmalene has tagged her videos with various versions and spelling of her name: Emmalene, Emma, Emmaline, Emmalina. I don’t know whether or not she’s been inspired by Emmalina or whether or not she’s trying to slip-stream on Emmalina’s viewership. For the record I note that when Emmalina tags her videos she only uses one version of her name, and sometimes doesn’t even use that.
What About Tasha?
Remember, Tasha’s “Hey clip" is in fifth place in all-time viewings, with over 6,000,000 viewings. Emmalina doesn’t have any video with a seven-figure viewership, though she has several with six-figure viewerships. But Tasha has fewer subscribers than Emmalina, roughly 1400 vs. roughly 5000. I figure that both of these numbers are indications of viewer interest. If only one of Tasha’s clips (she’s uploaded fifteen) has so many more viewings than any of Emmalina’s, why doesn’t she have as many or even more subscribers than Emmalina?
I’ve got a number of observations. In the first place, “Hey clip” has been online for ten months while none of Emmalina’s clips have been up for more than two months. Her “attention” dance clip has only been up there a week; how many viewings will it have accumulated in ten months? That’s one consideration.
But there’s something else. Emmalina is presenting herself, but Tasha is not doing that in “Hey clip.” To be sure, Tasha appears in that clip and others, but she doesn’t seem to be so interested in presenting her personal life and views. She doesn’t have videos where she directly addresses the audience. (If she did, would she speak in Hebrew or English? There’s a video of Tasha and her friends on a trip to Haifa. Tasha notes that “all is in hebrew so you probably wont understand all the crazy jokes.") This may explain why Emmalina has more subscribers than Tasha. She opens herself up to a different kind of interest than Tasha does, and there are lots of YouTubers with that particular and personalized kind of interest.
But how do we account for the large number of viewings “Hey clip” has received? For one thing, it is a good piece of work; not polished by any means, but inventive and witty. Kevin Smith, a thirty-five year old film-maker, placed a parodic homage to “Hey clip” into a promotional video (at 01:35 into the clip) he uploaded to YouTube. Emmalina’s work doesn’t display comparable craftsmanship; she doesn’t appear to be interested in achieving it. Tasha identifies some of her videos as exercises, so it appears that she’s systematically studying the craft. Perhaps the popularity of her clip is a straight-up matter of intrinsic aesthetic quality.
Perhaps. When you scan her list of videos you see three clips where she and “Hey clip” have been on Israeli TV, all in the past month. That kind of exposure would surely drive viewers to her video, but they might not necessarily be interested in doing anything beyond viewing that one clip. Further, the reach of Israeli TV is relatively limited; it doesn’t have the viewership the major American or Japanese channels, for example. But this exposure might have been enough to move “Hey clip” high enough in the YouTube rankings so that people casually browsing around are more likely to find and view it.
If this in fact is what’s going on, then we’d expect a lot of “Hey clip” action within the past month. But when we browse through the most viewed clips for “this month” it doesn’t appear in the top 100, where the inclusion threshold is a bit over 200K viewings. Nor does it appear in the top 100 clips for “this week” (I’m typing this on Friday 23 June), where the inclusion threshold is just under 30K. Thus “Hey clip” doesn’t appear to have gotten a great deal of action recently, not enough to have had much impact on the 6M viewings it has had in the past 10 months. Further, the Kevin Smith parody that I’ve already mentioned appeared about 2 months ago. Since he introduced the parody as an example of a popular YouTube style, Tasha’s video must have been well-known at that time, at least within YouTube.
Given the evidence readily available to me, I conclude that the overall popularity of “Hey clip” reflects the interest it has aroused within the YouTube community while exposure in MSM media doesn’t seem to have had much effect. Given the viewing numbers for both current week and current month, that interest may have peaked.
I continue to believe that “Hey clip” is interesting for its inherent expressive qualities rather than for whatever it tells us about Tasha’s life. The basis of its appeal is thus different from that for Emmalina’s clips, which are presented and viewed as documents about her and her life. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to further develop that distinction.
So What?
What does this tell us about cultural dynamics? I am interested in the way that audiences select the cultural materials they wish to absorb and to pass on. YouTube affords us glimpses into that process. My observations about Emmalina, Tasha, and the others are tentative at best. I’ve not spent more than a few hours looking around in YouTube and I don’t have access to the kind of statistical information one would need to begin understanding the dynamics at play in this environment.
The Tasha-Emmalina comparison would have been more didactically useful if I could have plausibly argued that most of the “Hey clip” viewings had been scored after Tasha’s TV appearances, or after the Kevin Smith parody. Had that been the case I could have pointed to those events as contingencies that had a major impact on the reception of that video clip. As it is, the “Hey clip” story is more plausibly offered as evidence of the independence of the online world from influence by mainstream media, though I wouldn’t want to push this too hard.
Nonetheless, in thinking about this I began to think about thresholds and dynamics. I don’t know how many clips are on YouTube at this point - six figures, seven, eight? - but a small number of them are more visible than others. These show up in the top-100 lists one can browse. Once a clip makes it into one of these lists it can it stay there at more or less the same rank, climb up the list, or drop back below the top-100 never to appear there again. What determines which of those things will happen?
I’m thinking of Robert DeVany’s work of the theatrical fate of movies, where he shows that, 8 to 10 weeks after theatrical release, a movie enters one of two trajectories: a rising trajectory to profitability or a falling one to obscurity and financial loss. In the case of YouTube, profitability is not directly relevant, and the venue is too new for long-term dynamics (years or more) to have developed. Still, “Hey clip” appears to have been relatively visible within YouTube for a relatively long period in YouTube’s life. Will it remain visible or sink into obscurity?
What about Emmalina’s clips? She has several with over 100K viewings each. Will any of these accumulate over a million viewings? What will happen to “Evolution of Dance," the video with the most viewings? It’s only been online for two months, but at 25M viewings it has twice as many viewings as any other clip. How long will it remain on top? I note that it is the only clip Jud Laipply has uploaded, whereas both Tasha and Emmalina have uploaded over ten clips. They seem committed to YouTube as an ongoing arena for exploration and expression whereas Laipply seems to have used it as a PR opportunity.
Laipply has appeared on both Good Morning America and the Today Show and has been featured on many websites. One suspects that he, or the speaker bureaus listing him, have very effective PR consultants. The popularity of his video thus seems to be driven by events outside YouTube whereas the rankings for both Emmalina and Tasha seem to be mostly driven by YouTube events - with perhaps some help from MySpace, where both women have pages.
Thus Laipply, Tasha, and Emmalina represent three different types of participation in YouTube. How many other participation styles are there? What’s the mix and how will this effect the long-term life of YouTube, which depends on returning a profit to investors?
Bonus Material
#1: Morbeck is a YouTube member with a visibility of roughly the same magnitude as Emmalina’s, though (s)he has a rather different kind of footprint. (S)he—I’m guessing he—adopts one from a small number of personae for each video. One of them is called Chipmunk Chick. Morbeck has recently uploaded a Chipmunck Chick clip proposing a reality TV program in which a bunch of YouTubers live together in a house and post videos to YouTube. Characters are eliminated from the program based on YouTube response to their videos. Morbeck asks: “Would they kill each other? would they become bestest friends? Would you like to see this show on TV and YouTube?”
Though this proposal is tongue way in cheek, there is something Very Serious going on here.
#2: Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut. This is 17 relatively short segments from a feature length animated cartoon. It was uploaded by a young film maker named Garrett Gilchrist. But Gilchrist didn’t make this film. It was made, but never completed, by Richard Williams, who is best known for his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Gilchrist explains:
This is not intended for profit, just a fanmade research project and tribute to this classic film. The film was worked on for 26 years, with a team of master animators like Ken Harris and Art Babbit. This film inspired Disney’s Aladdin. Ruined versions of it were released as Arabian Knight and The Princess and the Cobbler.
Comments
Bill
the RIAA has decided that videos of people lipsynching to recorded music (of which there are, as you’ll have noticed, millions of billions) on the internet is contrary to their interests and they’ve reportedly begun legal action against YouTube. They presumably want all copyright infringements taken off. That will effectively kill YouTube.
Naturally the info-is-free geeks of the internets are extremely pissed about this.
The Tasha video - the backing track is Hey by the Pixies, one of the truly great bands of the nineties - is the one that happened to be used to illustrate the story somewhere like Metafilter or Slashdot, and Will Wheaton also posted it on his blog, and so it’s percolated through the blog system and landed lots of links and hits that way. Like lots of Web 2.0 phenomena, the user-created ranking system on YouTube is self-fulfilling, with things in the top ten staying there because of the extra exposure they get.
Note: There’s been a SNAFU at YouTube in conseqence of which Emmalina has removed most of her videos from public view, including the “attention” one that I discuss in the article. She explains her actions. Morbeck is upset as well and has bid farewell to YouTube.
<HR>
I’m not surprised about the RIAA, Laura, but I’m not sure YouTube can be killed by so easily. Lip-synched videos are certainly common, but I don’t think YouTube depends on them. Nor, for that matter, are music copyrights the only ones being infringed. There are lots of film clips and snippits from TV shows up there that infringe as well. Lots of stuff for the lawyers to thrash out.
As for the “self-fulfilling” nature of user-ratings, that’s the point. (Will any English language literature ever be as good as Shakespeare, much less better?) But I don’t see any reason to believe that they’re static. I’ve only been looking at this stuff for a week or so and so I have no idea of the dynamics. And it seems to me that YouTube is young enough that lots of people are still just finding out about it.
Some things are ephemeral. In the past week a number of World Cup clips scored high in the daily and weekly rankings. Now that the World Cup is over I’d imagine they’ll fall in the rankings.
And how long can “Evolution of Dance” stay at the top? Yes, it’s had twice as many views as the next highest, but sooner or later interest in it will fall relative to interests in other clips. How many people who’ve seen it once watch it a second or third time? I don’t know, but it’s not as though more than a handfull of people watch any of these videos over and over. So interest in most of them will damp out over time.
I’ve just checked the daily, weekly, and monthly views lists for “Evolution of Dance” and it isn’t in the top 100 on any of those lists. The top-rated title on the monthly list has about 2M views while the 100th one has only about 200K views. Since “Evolution” did not make it into the top 100 I conclude that it had less than 200K views in June.
It went up on 6 April 2006 and has been seen 25,952,460 times (as of 2PM EDT on 24 June 2006). It looks to me like it attracted the vast bulk of those views during April and May and now interest has cooled off. So the interest in that video looks like a 2-month spike.
“Evolution” is so far ahead of anything else that it’ll take awhile for something else to catch it and surpass it. But it appears to me that its glory days are over. There’s little current interest in it. Newcomers to YouTube may watch it, as well as people who encounter it elsewhere on the web; but current YouTuber members and viewers aren’t giving it much attention.
Now, somewhere between 61 and 80 in the rankings is something called “Knife Skills." It was uploaded on 9 February 2006 and has had 1,777,224 views. It shows a young East Asian woman doing some flashy moves with a switch-blade and lasts 21 seconds. How much interest does the world have in such a thing?
I have no idea what’s going to happen here. It would be interesting to get a look at the statistics. But you’d need someone like Cosma Shalizi to help figure out what statistics were worth looking at.
Meanwhile I’ve noticed problems with the numbers. When I began drafting this piece 2 or 3 days ago “Evolution of Dance” had 25,323,199 views. When I checked a couple of minutes ago it had 25,952,460 views. So it has picked up 629,261 views in two or three days. Since the 100th item on the list for most views in the current month has just over 200K views, why didn’t “Evolution” make that list as well?
Maybe I misread the number from a few days ago. Maybe YouTube’s stats don’t mean what I think they mean. Maybe the routines that calculate those rankings are flakey.
Like every other new technology, You-tube entered the real world eventually.
The political blogosphere is getting nasty too—internal Democratic nastiness I mean. No longer a proof that anarchism works.
YouTube is only an extension of the webcam phenomenon. The only difference is that the footage on YT is more permanent. It attracts the same variety of homebrewn “acts”: basically, whatever bored people can do in front of a camera (including--sadly--homebrewn erotica).
The Simpsons live video (if you can call something with so much composited blue-screen footage live) is merely another example of clips and trailers being posted without authorization. It is the official trailer for a live version of Simpsons (see here).
Emmalina’s videos are now public again, btw.
I don’t think the RIAA pressure will “kill” YouTube, but it might change the content of the site considerably. A number of DIY filmmakers, for example, have used the site to promote their videos. DIY rock bands could also use the site to promote their music, of course.
I think Laura is absolutely right to note the problems with YouTube’s user rankings, which becoming “self-fulfilling” as people gravitate towards what is already popular (and as those videos become the subject of op-ed pieces as the “Bus Uncle” series did a few weeks ago).
John, I think that the “nastiness” on YouTube isn’t that big of an issue. People writing semi-anonymously on blogs or discussion boards will say inappropriate things, but that shouldn’t discount the valuable elements of these sites, whether YouTube or political blogs.
I think Laura is absolutely right to note the problems with YouTube’s user rankings, which becoming “self-fulfilling” as people gravitate towards what is already popular (and as those videos become the subject of op-ed pieces as the “Bus Uncle” series did a few weeks ago).
There’s no doubt in my mind that allowing users to browse clips according to those rankings has some effect on which clips get viewed. But to say it is a problem is to say that facility is interfering with something. What does it interfere with?
YouTube is a collection of videoclips. If the collection were a small one, say 20 or 30 items, it would be easy to put thumbnails of each clip on a single page that you could display on your screen without scrolling. There would be some bias here, mostly, I would guess, a function of how one scans through a rectangular matrix. I suspect that people who read English do that differently from those who read Japanese.
But the collection isn’t that small. It’s got hundreds of thousands of clips in it. So the YouTube folks have provided several ways for you to access the clips. Like many sites, YouTube allows you to search or to browse. You can browse by number of views, number of comments, user quality rating, but also most recently added and at random. The first three options obviously involve some kind of user-created ranking—and there are other such rankings as well—while the last two options do not.
I happen to be interested in anime. I can browse the “Arts & Animation” collection and get a bunch of anime plus lots of other stuff as well, over 340K clips. If I search on “anime” I get a list of over 100K clips. I particularly like a series called “Azumanga Daio” and so I searched on “Azumanga” and got 869 hits. Even 869 clips is a bit much to wade through, but, hey . . . that’s life.
Let’s instead imagine I wanted to find cool people, a notion that is not well-defined and, to some extent, a function of my personal preferences. How would I do that? Well, I’d poke around here and there looking for this and that and when I’d found, say, a half dozen or so people who I thought were cool, I’d start looking in their vicinity. Who do those people subscribe to? What videos are their favorites? Somewhere in here I might well look at “most viewed” or “most discussed” videos, but only as part of an overall strategy.
So far user rankings don’t seem to be much of a problem. Now, if I were to assert that the most viewed videoclips are the best, then we have a problem. But I haven’t said any such thing, and have no inclination to do so. What would happen if YouTube were to announce that, effective July 1, 2006, they would no longer display the number of views a clip had received and no longer offer the option to browse the top 100 most-viewed clips? While I doubt that would have much effect on people searching for clips with specific content, I rather imagine some YouTubers would be upset and would be quite vocal in expressing their displeasure. For some reason, they want to know those rankings. We can think about that, that’s where a discussion of ranking-induced bias becomes germane.
Let’s forget about YouTube, however, and think about The Valve. As it is currently set up, the most recent posts are the most visible ones. That arrangement has problems—as has been discussed here—but they don’t seem to be fatal, especially since there are various ways of accessing material that isn’t immediately visible.
What would happen if, instead, posts were displayed in order by the number of comments they’ve received? I think that would be very bad, especially if no provision were made for quickly finding new posts and for searching through old ones in various ways. In that case the front page would display a bunch of Zizek posts and a bunch of other Theory-releted posts and not much action on any of them because most of us have said what we want to say on those subjects. Further action would be up to newbies, but who’d come to such a slack intellectual backwater where very little happens?
But an intellectually specialized blog, like The Valve, is a very different beast from a general unspecialized repository like YouTube. You approach it with very different expectations about what to do and how to move around.
If you’re interested in user-created rankings as a way of ordering material, you might want to check out digg. I find the content a bit boring but not the way it operates.
Bill: “Now that the World Cup is over ...”
Not for England it baint be. Not til Saturday at the earliest.
Yike, Adam! Shows you how little I pay attention to such things.
Thanks for the link Laura; interesting site.
Meanwhile I found something at YouTube I hadn’t been looking for. One of the notion’s I’ve been entertaining is that manga and anime will do for the world’s visual culture of this century what African American music did for music in the last century: provide a set of widely imitated models. But it has seemed to me that there (at least) one obvious problem: How to fans make anime?
That is, the issue is fan participation. In the case of music, if someone likes jazz or blues or rock or hip hop it is not too difficult for them to make their own. Musical instruments aren’t prohibitively expensive and teachers are available. All you have to do is spend some time learning to make the music.
That’s easy enough to do with manga. The only materials you need are pen and paper, which are relatively cheap; and digital media make reproduction relatively cheap as well. The creation and distribution of fan-produced manga are well institutionalized in Japan.
But what about anime? Animation is much more difficult to do on an amateur basis. Even if digital technology is cheaper than film technology, you have the labor of making cell after cell after cell. It’s difficult to do very much of this without involving several people in some kind of rationalized production system that’s far more intensive than that involved in, say, a rock and roll band.
But it’s not so difficult to take existing anime and rework clips on your computer. And that’s what lots of fans have been doing. A standard thing to do is simply to assemble a bunch of your favorite clips to a song that you like, thereby violating a pile of copyrights. Some people have been quite imaginative about this.
“Azumanga Bebop" is a clip that involves two very different anime series, Cowboy Bebop and Azumanga Daioh. The first is an action-adventure series set in space in the near future; “cowboy” is slang for bounty hunter. The second follows a group of teenaged girls through three years of high school. “Azumanga Bebop” takes the opening title music and visual style of Bebop and swaps in the characters from Daioh. It’s quite witty, though you need to be familiar with the two series to appreciate the humor. In fact, if you don’t know the sources you might not even detect any incongruity here.
“Lord of the Yen Trilogy" marries clips from Azumanga Daioh with voices and music from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We get three trailers, one for each film in the triology. Here the incongruity is obvious and doesn’t require knowledge of either source.
As for copyright, I have no idea how this will shake-out. Unauthorized usage has been part of anime culture for years. Fans will record titles off Japanese TV, add foreign language subtitles, and then distribute the fansubs (as they are called) over the internet. I don’t see how this genie can be put back in the bottle.
Which puts YouTube and similar services in a ridiculous situation. Their terms of service forbid posting of copyrighted material without permission. And I’m sure that, when you upload a clip, you’ve got to state that the clip is legally yours to upload. But management surely knows that their users are violating copyright.
For what it’s worth, the most viewed in the past day/week/month/all time is actually showing you most viewed of videos uploaded in the past day/week/month/all time.
This may change some of the analysis above.
That clarifies things a bit, Jake. Thanks.
Emmalina has a Wikipedia entry, with links to articles about her in the MSM. It was created on 26 June. She is approaching 8000 subscribers.
Tasha has posted a new video, which has yet to attract much attention beyond her small group of fans, one of whom has proclaimed it her best ever. With 6,799,670 views for “Hey clip," she’s still 5th on YouTube, while Judson Laipply is first, now with 28,015,104 total views (and only one video posted).
Note: these numbers are specific to date and time of posting. They will change over time.
YouTube has decided to crack down on people posting cartoons that are under copyright, but not otherwise available. See here, here, and here for commentary.
Looks like Emmalina has all but left YouTube. She’s removed all her videos, but still has a page there, just enough to let people know that she’s left. Her parting words: “Find someone else’s life to involve yourself in; it’s not going to be mine anymore.”
And one fan, F1lm Junk, has posted a protest against the conditions that caused Emmalina to leave. Part of the text posted along with the video:
I think emmalina was right when she said that there’s no point becoming popular on YouTube- because the risks far outweigh the benefits.
This video is my tribute to emmalina. A girl who captivated me, and was the one who compelled me to start making videos. Her dancing was great. The way she was so easily able to say things about herself that nobody else would- was awseome. She really was something else on YouTube, therefore honestly deserving the #4 most viewed person title. I’m just sorry she’s gone from YouTube.
So, will Emmalina’s departure ripple through YouTube?
Your blog is one of the few I was actually able to read to the end. I was surprised to find my name in it, actually.
In case you are/were wondering, the variations were used as the way my family writes my name. They all have their own ideas about how it should (or should have) been spelled..and my nickname within my close family is Emmalina
Thanks for the clarification, Emmalene.